intellectual property is just the most recent form of commodification under capitalism – expansion only furthers this neoliberal mindset

Most fundamentally, the history of intellectual property should be understood as part of the process of commodification. The appearance of the set of legal relations we call today intellectual property was, first and foremost, part of the relentless and all-encompassing process of expanding the commodity form, as applied to various kinds of infor– mation. This process happened on the ground in changing practices of increasingly subjecting information to general market exchange. But it also involved a conceptual change—a new specific way of understanding information. Both the practice and the concept had a distinctive structure consisting of three different conceptual elements. First, to become a commodity, information had to become a “thing” or an object. In premodern times, various kinds of information were understood in fluid terms as living human knowledge, a dynamic process, or even as an aspect of persons.139 Before information could become an object of market exchange, a thing to be bought and sold, this dynamic character had to be wrestled to the ground—it had to become an object. The first phase of creating intellectual property then was constructing the relevant informational objects. Second, these informational objects had to be “first transformed into bars in the head and in speech before they are exchanged for one another.”140 In other words, informational objects had to be understood as reducible to their abstract and commensurable exchange value and as produced in order to extract this value from any possible market. A third and last aspect was the question of drawing borders: what kinds of information were to be subjected to this form and what kinds had to be left outside it? The distinctive structure of commodified information gradually came to be embedded in the applicable legal forms. It is this embodiment of the commodity form as applied to information which distinguishes the unique phenomenon of intellectual property. Information was far from completely unregulated prior to the appearance of intellectual property, as attested by many premodern institutional arrangements such as guild regulation of craft secrecy, restrictions on the immigration of skilled craftsmen, patronage, and censorship. 141 What separates these and many other forms of regulating the production and dissemination of information from the later-coming intellectual property is exactly the commodity form. Commodification, then, is a powerful concept for understanding the development of the distinctly modern phenomenon of intellectual property. At the same time, commodification was neither a preordained uniform structure nor an unchanging, static one once appearing. The process of development was rife with contestation and negotiation, rather than the progressive extension of a readymade structure. Each of the three conceptual dimensions of commodifying information gave rise to many puzzles such as what exactly was the object of exchange, how was its value to be measured, what exactly could be owned or bought and sold, and what constituted interference with property rights. There was also friction with deeply held ideological commit– ments, most prominently various forms of aversion to ownership of knowledge. And often there was resistance from various interested groups who resorted to both the conceptual loose ends and countervailing ideology. The result was specific and unique patterns of commodifying information, patterns that were not identical in all contexts or places and remained dynamic over time. This history accounts for both the conceptual unity and the internal diversity of the area of intellectual property: the field’s overarching principle is the commodification of information while its different subfields are marked by the different patterns of commodification as those developed historically (with further variation within each field). The development of these patterns is a rich vein to be mined by historians. And the story to be told is threefold, encompassing the emergence of: the general, distinctively modern, framework of commodifying information, i.e., intellectual property; the carving out of the general sub-areas within it; and also the phenomenon of incomplete commodification. The latter refers to the fact that, in some contexts, ideological resistance and interest groups’ tussles produced incomplete commodification: the demarcation of certain kinds of information as residing outside the domain of commodification.142 Some examples of this include news,143 basic scientific research, 144 and what came to be known as “moral rights” that in the continental tradition emerged as extra-territorial islands deliberately designed to insulate certain human interests from market commodification. 145 Again, these different patterns of incomplete commodification, their negotiation and dynamic shift over time, as well as their geographical migration and cross-influence, holds promising prospects for historical exploration.