Whose Property? Mapping Intellectual Property Rights, Contextualizing Digital Technology and Framing Social Justice

Kalantzis-Cope, Phillip

doi:10.1057/9780230299047_22

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Within studies of the social impact of digital technologies, the gift has entered the literature as counter-distinction to the transactional logic of markets. The gift has also provided a conceptual framework to illuminate anti-capitalist strategies imminent within the technical form and practices of digital communication networks (Barbrook, 1998;Terranova, 2004;Virilio, 2000;Wark, 2004;Kalantzis-Cope 2011). Through grammars of peer-to-peer production, grounded in the gift practices of the information economy (for instance, Creative Commons licences, Free/Libre and open source software), digital communication networks, it is argued, present an opportunity for the production of social orders not determined by the evolving historical logics of capitalist production (Bauwens, 2005).…”

Section: The 'Gift' Of 'Big Data'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Whose data? Problematizing the ‘gift’ of social labour

Kalantzis-Cope

2016

Global Media and Communication

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Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google, and Jared Cohen, Founder and Director of Google Ideas, contend that ‘for governments and companies’, the user-generated content that constitutes big data is ‘a gift, enabling them to better respond to citizen and customer concerns, and, within the emergent field of predictive analysis, to predict what the future will hold’. In this article, I interrogate what it means for data from our social lives to be interpreted as a ‘gift’ by private enterprises such as Google. Who is giving what to whom? What is the nature of the transaction? Whose property is this data? By putting into conversation Schmidt and Cohen’s gift thesis with an analysis of the ‘value’ of participation in digital communication networks, this article seeks to uncover an intellectual property conundrum that legitimizes the rise of new kinds of labour vulnerabilities in the digital age; intensifying the extension of the logic of privatization into our digital social lives; and, in doing so, the importance of intellectual property as a language of critique and resistance.

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Section: The 'Gift' Of 'Big Data'mentioning

confidence: 99%