Common Cause: Global Resistance to Intellectual Property Rights (original) (raw)

This chapter chronicles the field of opposition to repressive IP regimes. Although a comprehensive overview of this terrain is not possible here, we offer a broad survey of the scope of international resistance to dominant IP frameworks and highlight what is at stake culturally and politically for community media makers who contest the complete propertization of creative and intellectual production. Resistance Resistance to intellectual property takes many forms, including everyday practice, contests over technologies, struggles over the terms of debate, protest and direct action, policy reform, and counterprojects of commons-based production (see Table 1). Grassroots social movements, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), scientists, activists, governments, and some businesses resist IP with a range of tactics, both inside and outside the policy world, in local, national, and international venues. [***Table 1 goes here***] Everyday Forms of Resistance IPRs, as a hegemonic set of laws, norms, and enforcement mechanisms, face constant challenges from people's daily practices, sometimes with political intent but often without. For example, community media makers often participate in informal economies of unlicensed audiovisual and software exchange, sampling, mash-ups, and remix satire of industry antipiracy propaganda. These practices are everyday forms of resistance (Scott, 1990) and are part of a broader general ethos of ignoring or actively undermining IPRs. People continue to freely share audiovisual Peer/commons production/ counterprojects Most forms of cultural production. Copyleft, Creative Commons. Remix culture. Wikipedia. Collaborative production tools. Traditional knowledge. Collective seed development. Public domain DNA base. BIOS. Public funding for medical research. Open Access publishing. Alternative licensing. PLoS. FOSS.