Beyond IP - The Cost of Free Informational Capitalism in a Post IP Era
A CIPP talk with Professor Guy Pessach, Faculty of Law, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
About the speaker
Professor Guy Pessach’s main areas of research are Copyright Law, Comparative and International Aspects of the Creative Industries and Law & Technology.
Pessach was a Fulbright Scholar, Residential Fellow at the Information Society Project, Yale Law School; a Visiting Professor at Columbia Law School & the Center for Transnational Legal Studies, Georgetown University Law School and also an Erasmus Mundus, Visiting Scholar at the Center for Law, Society and Pop Culture, University of Westminster.
Prior to his academic career, Pessach clerked for Justice Zamir at the Israeli Supreme Court.Â
Abstract
The frame “Beyond IP” is gradually becoming a key term in the political economy of intellectual property. It captures the social costs of legal ordering through intellectual property and offers alternative institutions and regulatory options. “Beyond IP” is also a descriptive term that summarizes a growing number of contemporary information and cultural institutions, which rest upon concepts of free content and free access as their building blocks.
This talk questions the conventional wisdom of critical copyright scholarship, which tends to pair proprietary intellectual property protection with informational capitalism and the commodification of culture. It offers the first novel critical examination of the political economy of information markets that operate beyond the boundaries of IP. It shall be argued that tensions and dichotomies that we are accustomed to attribute to "IP-centric" regimes are tensions and dichotomies which may appear, or even be stimulated, also by copyright’s negative spaces and certain beyond IP legal regimes. Beyond IP market realms tend to conflict with the values of cultural democracy, informational privacy and creative diversity.
This analysis bears significant normative implications on the desirability of contemporary approaches, which support legal reforms towards beyond IP legal regimes.
