Intellectual Property is a form of Neoliberal biopolitical power.
Hull 19, Gordon Hull is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has published numerous articles on contemporary philosophical and political theory, intellectual property, privacy, and the history of philosophy. He is also the author of Hobbes and the Making of Modem Political Thought (2009). “The Biopolitics of Intellectual Property REGULATING INNOVATION AND PERSONHOOD IN THE INFORMATION AGE”, HP JLB, Cambridge University Press, Scanned Copy of Pages 185-186.
Put most briefly, this book has argued three things. First, intellectual property (IP) is a form of power. By that I mean that it exists in and through specific institutional, political, and social contexts, and influences the behavior of people in various ways with varying degrees of coercion attached. Second, the nature of this power has been shifting, particularly in the last thirty years or so. If one divides modem forms of power into an admittedly rough schema, it is possible to adumbrate juridical, public biopolitical, and neoliberal biopolitical variants. Although no form of power as socially diffuse and culturally fundamental as IP will monolithically transition from univocally expressing one form of power to another, it is possible to observe a marked shift in IP law in the direction of neoliberal biopower. This shift is evident in the increasing adoption of individualizing, market-driven provisions grounded in a Demsetzian understanding of property driven by the internalization of (publicfacing) externalities. From the attempt to patent isolated genetic fragments to efforts to protect brands as themselves commodities, IP law has increasingly insinuated itself into the everyday lives of individuals, nudging them to understand themselves as market actors at all times, rewarding producers who produce for market exploitation and consumers who interact with cultural products as though they were so produced. Third, we can see that IP law, as other forms of power, is also legible as a process of subjectification, which is to say that it is in the business of making people. The blockhead model of creativity and correlative passive consumer, the brand-conscious individual envisioned by regimes like trademark dilution, and the actuarial agent of contemporary biomedicine are all examples of the kinds of individuals imagined by neoliberal biopower and encouraged by its expression in intellectual property policy. These are contingent forms, as the contrast with the Mertonian scientist, drew sampling artist who sees appropriation as creation, and the artist who secs in a Louis Vuitton bag a powerful symbol for cultural critique indicate. So too, individuals do not naturally approach music as consumers and resist being forced to do so by technologies. It takes effort to persuade scientists that they should treat their research process as governed by the standards of homo economicus and artists that they should pay for access to culturally important symbols.