The Politics of Global Information Sharing: Whose Cultural Agendas Are Being Advanced?
| Date | 01 December 2009 |
| Author | Kathy Bowrey,Jane Anderson |
| Published date | 01 December 2009 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663909345095 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
THE POLITICS OF GLOBAL
INFORMATION SHARING:
WHOSE CULTURAL AGENDAS
ARE BEING ADVANCED?
KATHY BOWREY AND JANE ANDERSON
University of New South Wales, Australia, and New York University, USA
ABSTRACT
Open-knowledge communities, the public domain and public policies protecting the
global sharing of information and resources seek to counter the last decade of IP maxi-
malization. Such movements aim to rebalance ‘public’ interests within IP discourse.
Historically, dispossession of Indigenous persons in settler communities was con-
comitant with their exclusion from ‘the public’. This has significant consequences for
Indigenous peoples struggling to regain control over knowledge resources today. This
article considers the imaginary inclusions that underlie Anglo-Australian intellectual
property law and considers problems with redressing past injustice by defining Indi-
genous difference in terms of a cultural exception within intellectual property law.
KEY WORDS
Empire; Enlightenment; Indigenous rights; information commons; intellectual
property; public domain; race; sovereignty
INTRODUCTION
Until the early 1990s when Aboriginal people such as myself started document-
ing our communities in film, there was an estimated six thousand hours of
material created about our communities, of which perhaps ten hours actually
involved some Aboriginal input. It is the same with the images that were taken
to document our communities in missions, in Settlements and in camps – they
are not the images that we would have chosen to represent ourselves. (Kinnane,
2004: 257, emphasis in original)
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES © The Author(s), 2009
Reprints and Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
0964 6639, Vol. 18(4), 479–504
DOI: 10.1177/0964663909345095
ADECADE OF intellectual property rights (IP) maximalization has in-
vigorated a global counter-movement in support of open-knowledge
communities, the public domain, creative commons, and public
policies protecting the global sharing of information and resources.1For an
academic project, the IP ‘access movement’ is unusually forward-looking
with overt political ambitions. Activists seek to win hearts and minds – to
change the global knowledge culture and the IP practices of creators, inno-
vators and investors. Through a shift in the attitudes and practices of civil
society, and especially by winning over large public institutions such as uni-
versities, libraries and museums, there will be pressure on legal policy makers
to change jurisprudence to better reflect the ‘public’ side of the IP balance.
While open access, public domain and creative commons articulate them-
selves differently, they share motivations in terms of developing frameworks
for social change with regards to how knowledge is to be accessed and circu-
lated. As such they each rely upon, and fold into each other, ideational prin-
ciples that oscillate around concepts such as ‘freedom’, ‘public’, ‘openness’,
‘sharing’ and ‘commons’. Such concepts come with complex derivations,
histories and politics, both in relation to their generic definitions, and more
importantly, their place within liberal and democratic frameworks of action.
As Tatiana Flesess (2008: 394) has observed in a recent edition of this journal,
‘participants in the debates regarding the commons . . . are establishing (and
then policing) the thresholds and boundaries between differing versions and
visions of the past, of “us” and “them” and of what is available to be claimed
for use and by whom’. Such terms, despite their appearance and constantly
shifting nature, are not and have never been wholly inclusive of peoples,
perspectives or cultures. Their borders are managed in order to establish
normative orders for inclusion and participation. This reality runs like a
fault-line through these movements, connecting them together in important
ways, while at the same time compromising their promise to change global
knowledge cultures. For their success, there must now be a serious commit-
ment to understanding the ongoing instances where these movements, some-
times unwittingly, repeat significant historical exclusions.
The ethos of freedom, public, openness and commons is problematic
because it does not properly deal with the baggage of the past. For many
Indigenous people across the globe, there is no fuzzy, warm glow that auto-
matically accompanies western words like humanity, culture, progress, free-
dom, openness, knowledge. For Indigenous people living in Australia there
is no automatic sense of entitlement or inclusion that comes with notions of
‘the public’, the ‘public good’ or ‘the public interest’. These idealistic politi-
cal and cultural concepts were, and arguably still are, largely experienced by
Indigenous people as terms of exclusion. These were the very terms that
justified the denials of sovereignty, dispossession of culture and lands and
removal of Indigenous children from their families and communities. The
whole notion of ‘the public’ in intellectual property presumes a notion of
inclusion and representativeness that is at odds with Indigenous experiences
within colonial contexts. Indigenous people and ‘the public’ should not be
assumed to share a common interest.
480 SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 18(4)
To continue reading
Request your trial