Copyright is a biopolitical tool for nations to exercise long-term power over its populations.
Gervassis 20, Dr Nicholas Gervassis is an Assistant Professor in Law (Technology and Data) at the University of Nottingham. He’s read law at the Democritus University of Thrace, Greece. He completed the LLM in Innovation, Technology and the Law at the University of Edinburgh, and he was awarded his PhD from the same institution. “Information biopolitics: copyright law and the regulation of life in the network society”, 2020-06-25, JLB, International Review of Law, Computers & Technology, Volume 35, 2021 - Issue 1
Online settings illustrate sharply our passing into the information age in the truest manner, with the development of culture and social relationships being mediated exclusively via ‘palpable’ digital information artefacts, like texts, images, videos, webpage links and social networking accounts. Suspended between its intangible nature and its various ‘tangible’ expressions, and according to Drahos constituting ‘the daily lifeblood of human agents as communicating beings’, information regulated under familiar legal conceptions of property suggests arguably ‘biopolitical’ developments: the hold, which one exerts on information items, extends to administering essentially life in its social and cultural aspects. The propertisation of information in copyright laws authorises long-term exercises of power that, in future, computer-mediated societies, could both undercut circulation of vital knowledge and structure the public’s participation in culture, thus interfering effectively with the development of personal, social and political identities. Such concerns appear more plausible in view of the increase of corporate power across online settings, contested between concentrations of copyright-intensive industries and web hosting giants, and following debates over the impacts of laws like the recently introduced EU Directive 2019/790 (Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market). By reviewing copyright law developments, this paper reflects on Foucauldian understandings of biopolitics and media ecology theoretical interpretations, to comment critically on the regulation of information and online public interaction spaces.