Complete anti-property leads to “negative spaces” where feudalism rules

As this suggests, and more broadly, the argument here underscores two further points about IP. First, the cultural and economic arguments need to be understood together in terms of a larger, public biopolitics of innovation. In that space, more traditionally “political” questions are important to foreground. For example, even where “negative spaces” of IP exist, there is a risk that they would immediately be appropriated by cultural elites or market actors. This is the force of Anupam Chander and Madhavi Sunder’s (2004) warning against the “romance of the public domain.” To locate something in the public domain means that it is free for everyone to use. In the case of indigenous people in particular, this can have disastrous results, as it not only reinscribes the idea that indigenous people are objects of knowledge but not producers, but also potentially opens up their entire cultural production to expropriation by Western multinationals. At the same time, as Hemmungs Wirtén (2008) points out, the original English commons land use regimes were fundamentally regimes designed to manage around poverty under feudalism. Any return to public biopolitics or a different understanding of property cannot be a return either to poverty or to feudalism.