IPR is the only way to create communal cultural exchange, contest hegemonic discourses, and recognize diverse cultures

Madhavi Sunder, “From Goods to a Good Life”, Yale University Press, Pages 10-12, 2012

To promote development as freedom, in Sen’s words, intellectual property law should seek to enhance people’s capacity to participate in cultural production and shared communities of meaning. Furthermore, we must recognize that cultural production is both an end and a means of development. Recognition of Australian aboriginal artists, African musicians, and Ethiopian farmers as producers of cultural meaning, for example, could potentially direct significant revenues into these countries. As Sen has written, “cultural liberty is important not only in the cultural sphere, but in the successes and failures in social, political, and economic spheres. The different dimensions of human life have strong interrelations.” 13 Here, working through culture has yet another meaning. In the Knowledge Age, cultural work is a promising means of economic development. Concerns about the commodification of culture notwithstanding, working through culture can offer an antidote to alienation by providing recognition and remuneration for meaningful work.

Shared Meaning

Finally, growth and diversification in cultural production may promote mutual recognition and understanding across diverse cultures. As media scholars observe, the phenomenally popular new websites of the early part of this new century, from Facebook to YouTube to Flickr, are not necessarily about high- quality content but “social connections.” 14 Shared meaning goes to the very heart of what makes culture tick; culture evokes communal responses to and affection for common musical and literary referents. The communal nature of the new Participation Age cannot be overstated. As President Obama stated in his Inaugural Address, today’s electronic networks not only “feed our commerce,” but also “bind us together.” 15

Put simply, a global culture in which all peoples have an opportunity to be creators is surely a means to economic development, but it is also much more. The cultural sphere of life encompasses those joys that make a human life truly worth living. As child psychologists observe, “When young children are free from illness, malnutrition, neglect, and abuse, they turn their considerable energies to play.” 16 This is the crux of Sen’s insight that economic development goals must go beyond raising GDP to ask what is required to ensure that people can live fulfi lling lives.

Cultural exchanges are not merely monetary transactions involving static goods. Individuals make cultural goods to share with others parts of themselves—their history, their music, their stories. Cultural activity promotes self- development and mutual understanding, potentially realizing G. W. F. Hegel’s twin goals of “individual self- realization and reciprocal recognition.” Serious study of the processes of cultural production and exchange governed by modern intellectual property laws must recognize the special ways in which culture can promote mutual recognition and understanding. As John Dewey eloquently put it, “the art characteristic of a civilization is the means for entering sympathetically into the deepest elements in the experience of remote and foreign civilizations.” 17 By pointing out the common human characteristics that bind us all, culture promotes shared meaning not only among those who look and think alike, but also among far- flung peoples.

beyond efficiency

Intellectual property scholars today focus on a single goal: efficiency. But in this book, I elaborate the connections between cultural production and plural values, from freedom to equality, democracy, development, and mutual recognition and understanding. Freedom to participate in cultural life stands at the very core of liberty. As Salman Rushdie has stated, “Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.” 18 Cultural liberty also has important implications for equality. The liberty to contest hegemonic discourses has particularly profound possibilities for women and other minorities who have not traditionally had power over the stories that dominate their lives. Drawing on the insights of Charles Taylor’s “politics of recognition,” I will show with various real- world examples how democratizing the capacity to make and contest culture can distribute power to shape meaning and enhance the capacity to contest hegemonic meanings—so long as copyright and trademark laws do not stand in the way

Active engagement in the cultural sphere can also be a school for engendering the central traits of democratic citizenship, from critical thinking to creativity to sharing and sociability. I have already alluded to how democratic participation in making culture is linked to economic develop ment; I will also consider how recognizing diverse others as authors and inventors promotes mutual recognition and mutual understanding.