Property abolition doesn’t challenge neoliberal power, it just transfers decision-making directly to the market

In terms of understanding IP, the most important result of this study is that it is useful to understand IP as a kind of power. Further, it is important to understand power in differential terms, as operating according to different logics. This has several implications. First, criticisms of IP that address primarily its quantity or decry it as a form of power only tell part of the story. It is true that there is “more” IP law now than in the past, measured both in terms of its extension into new areas and its intensity in the areas that it does cover. That argument is important, but it does not say why that quantitative increase in IP is either bad or good. Indeed, it runs the risk of defaulting to a position that the alternative to too much IP is no IP. It might be the case that no IP would be good, but such claims often seem tethered to the idea that a world without IP would be a world without the imbrication of power relations into cultural production. A second implication is that we have no reason to assume that such a world without power could ever be the case, and many reasons to think that it would not. Cultural production inevitably involves power relations. This point is harder to see than it should be because neoliberalism is depoliticizing, hiding its political economy behind a veneer of internalization and consumer preferences.1 An excessive focus on markets makes us forget why the spaces outside of markets matter; or, as Hardt and Negri memorably put it, “private property makes us stupid” (2004, p. 188). This is particularly clear in the way that DRM deflects responsibility for the control it exerts over users onto supposedly neutral technological platforms rather than those who insist on their presence, as I argued in Chapter 3 on copyright. In such an environment, it is too easy to fail to recognize the extent to which IP necessarily embodies political relations, and the extent to which its absence will also embody political relations. The inference from the absence of IP to the absence of power is without foundation.2 Research into so-called low-IP zones – areas of cultural production where IP law is unavailable or has been rejected by the relevant actors – shows that there are a range of alternatives to IP, but that all of them involve complex relations of power, whether that power is exercised through social norms, market pressures, architectural features, or direct physical coercion.3 This research is fascinating and valuable precisely because it helps us to imagine a world with different kinds of social relations around intellectual goods. These relations can, but do not necessarily have to, rely on social norms. For one, IP law itself interacts in complicated ways with social norms, especially when transgression of property is itself a form of critique. Hip-hop sampling is a prominent example in a constellation of often (but not necessarily) critical practices that functions critically precisely when it is at the margins of legality.4 Indeed, if one’s goal is innovation, social norms can work to dampen innovation by siloing creativity into narrow channels, away from the benefits of cross-fertilization (Bair & Pedraza-Fariña, 2018). In any case, social norms matter when it comes to our relations to intellectual goods, and how they make us as people.