K - Capitalism - CNDI 2024

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1NC – IP Generic
The aff’s version of intellectual property is inextricably capitalist—it relies on commodification and maintenance of capitalist structures
Bracha 20
Oren, Howrey LLP and Arnold, White & Durkee Centennial Professorship in Law @ UT Austin. “The History Intellectual Property as The History of Capitalism.” Case Western Reserve Law Review. Vol 71: Issue 2. 2020. Pp 572-583. //InTr
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 information. 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. A second element of situating the history of intellectual property within the history of capitalism is uncovering the development of how this area came to play a constitutive role in important junctures of the structure of modern economic relations. The rise of intellectual property was not limited to the creation of a mechanism for the market exchange of information as a consumer good. In various ways, intellectual property rights acquired a deeper structural role in the organization of economic relations. As Michael Zakim observes: “The knowledge economy is not . . . a ‘post-industrial,’ and certainly not a ‘postcapitalist,’ development.” 146 In other words, the growth and transformation of business in the nineteenth century was, in fact, the first information age with “the capital of mind” playing a major role in it.147 This was true of applied knowledge pertaining to the material world that was the basis of the physical infrastructure of capitalism: everything from innovations such as railroads, telegraphy, and telephony that constituted the transportation and communication revolutions, to the designs of the new machines and chemical processes that powered factories.148 It was also true of new knowledge of manip– ulating the social and commercial spheres such as accounting and filing systems, business statistics, or financing schemes that constituted the business revolution.149 Ownership under intellectual property rights was potentially relevant for all of those infrastructural assets. In some cases, this meant straightforward extension of proprietary rights, most commonly patents and trade secrets.150 Other cases, such as business statistics 151 or accounting systems, 152 involved struggles, sometimes resulting in incomplete commodification. The point is that intellectual property rights came to play a structural role on this deeper level of the system’s knowledge infrastructure. Commodification of information unfolded not just with respect to consumer markets but also as a regulative principle of the system’s infrastructure. Intellectual property rights also played a structural role with respect to business organization. Until after the Civil War, assignment of patent shares played a major role in structuring business partnership around innovative technologies. 153 In the absence of general incorporation that became available only around the mid-century, assigning patent shares was the direct vehicle for molding business structure.154 Similarly, geographical licensing supplied the foundations for a form of territorial franchising in an age where nation-wide operation by a single business entity was rare.155 Somewhat later, patent pools that created schemes for licensing a multitude of rights necessary for particular technologies began to play a broader organizational role in shaping and regulating the operation of entire industries.156 Both share-assignments and pools, rather than limited to being mechanisms for overcoming transaction costs in transferring ownership or permissions from sellers to buyers, were more fundamental important instruments of structuring business. Around the turn of the twentieth century, business organization mushroomed dramatically in scope and scale with the corporate R&D lab becoming a central mode of innovation.157 In this context, patents, which now were often held in portfolios, became instruments of corporate security.158 Firms used such portfolios to try to obtain predictability and “rationality,” draw the borderlines of their zones of operation and negotiate industry-wide arrangements.159 As a top official of an AT&T subsidiary put it in 1926, referring to patent licensing arrangements: The regulation of the relationship between two such large interests as the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. and the General Electric Co. and the prevention of invasion of their respective fields is accomplished by mutual adjustment within “no man’s land” where the offensive of the parties as related to these competitive activities is recognized as a natural defense against invasion of the major fields.160 In copyright, the structural role of rights in business organization was developed later. As relevant industries as well as the applicable copyright framework grew more complex, this structural role became more significant. One early example is the music industry, where early in the twentieth century right portfolios were the vehicle of maneuvers to try to control the industry161 and where later organizational patterns of businesses and intermediaries came to revolve around the copyright framework. One last structural role of intellectual property worth mentioning here pertains to trademark law. In this area, the structural role with respect to general patterns of economic activity is exactly the line dividing traditional trademark law as a form of anti-fraud protection from its gradual propertization, meaning its becoming truly a branch of intellectual property (which is still contested even today). 162 Goodwill, that elusive asset that shrewd businessmen began to sell and license around the mid-nineteenth century,163 is a double abstraction. It is the commodification of business success. Commodification took here its usual two-step course: first, reducing the dynamic and evanescent character of everything that made a business successful into an object, securing it in place by mooring it to a symbol; then, making this new object the subject of market exchange. Through the market exchange of a new object called goodwill, commodification came to be applied not only to informational consumer goods and various elements of capitalism’s infrastructure, but to business success itself. Trademark law built around goodwill supplied the constitutive legal forms. The somewhat younger cousin of goodwill—the brand—and its legal form further extended this process to encompass a particular key feature of business success: the power to cultivate and channel human desire. To succeed, businesses needed to harness human desire to buy. A major development of capitalism, embodied in the rise of the advertisement industry, was erecting a systematic mechanism for cultivating and channeling preferences or “needs.”164 Brands emerged as semiotic receptacles for the product of this mechanism: petrified crystals capturing and mooring down the dynamic process of channeling human desire. The (incomplete) extension of trademark law to protect the value of brands and facilitate their market exchange was the process of commodifying the value of molded human desire as embodying selling power.165 Commodifying selling power as captured by semiotic commercial devices laid, in turn, the foundation for yet another business organization form heavily reliant on intellectual property: the modern franchise.166 The third distinctive aspect of intellectual property studied as part of the history of capitalism is conceptual. The context of ownership of information had been one where basic latent assumptions characteristic of a market society that usually remain silent were often challenged, wrestled with, or at least momentarily forced to the surface. In other words, ownership of information is where naturalization tends to burst at the seams. The reason for this is that ownership of intangibles destabilizes one widespread strategy of naturalization, meaning: physicalization. Physicalization is the representation of a social relation between people as a physical (and hence “natural”) relation between things or between things and people. 167 Property is an area where physicalization abounds, where legal relations between people masquerade as physical relations between people and things.168 But this has never worked smoothly with intellectual property. As the name implies, intellectual property, at least once understood as such, wears its nonphysicalism on its sleeve. In the words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., these are rights “in vacuo” that create “a prohibition of conduct remote from the persons or tangibles of the party having the right.”169 And this obvious intangibility of the object of property tended to disrupt the disguise of the property relation as a physical one. The upshot of this dynamic was that in some moments intellectual property’s disruption of the physicalist naturalization extended to all property rights170 and indeed to all legal relations.171 This is not to say that physicalization has ever been banished from the area of intellectual property. Nevertheless, it is less stable and more prone for disruption in the context of ownership of information. Thus, intellectual property has been an area where occasionally a window had opened offering a view beyond at least some of the naturalizing assumptions of a market society and forcing participants to wrestle with the questions that then came into view. It is therefore an opportune area of study for the historian of capitalism. The above are three reasons why there is a remarkable fit between the frame of the history of capitalism—properly understood—and the subject of intellectual property. First, the history of intellectual property is a fascinating case study of capitalism’s basic unit: commodification. It demonstrates both the general logic and how the specific context in which it unfolds matters a great deal. Second, in various ways, intellectual property has played an important structural role in the consolidation and development of capitalist economic organization. Finally, intellectual property is a context where some of the naturalizing assumptions of a capitalist society, at least in some specific moments, tend to float to the surface and be laid bare to contend with, both for the historical actor and the historian. Other reasons for this remarkable fit may occur to the reader.
Capitalism causes everything from child labor to climate change—it’s try or die for the alt
Nawaz & Sabir 23
Abdul Rehman, research assistant at the Institute of Development and Economics Alternatives (IDEAS); Ali Asad, political economist and senior research assistant at IDEAS; 5-28-2023, "Profit over planet: capitalism's impact on climate crisis", T-Magazine, https://tribune.com.pk/story/2419022/profit-over-planet-capitalisms-impact-on-climate-crisis /AB
A World Bank study shows that climate change is already costing developing countries billions of dollars each year. The cost of climate change is expected to rise to $210 billion per year by 2050. Similarly, a report by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows that the industrial sector is responsible for 37% of global greenhouse gas emissions. This sector includes manufacturing, construction, and energy production. Multinational firms are the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases. The economic system values that profit and growth above everything else, leading to constant consumption, production, and resource extraction. The effects are disastrous, with natural habitats being destroyed, resources depleted, and greenhouse gas emissions skyrocketing. Multinational corporations are some of the biggest culprits when it comes to capitalism's impact on climate change. These companies prioritise profit over environmental sustainability, and their actions reflect this priority. For instance, oil and gas companies have been known to engage in practices such as fracking and offshore drilling, which release substantial amounts of methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The impact of climate change caused by capitalism is not limited to the environment. It also has a significant impact on communities around the world, particularly those in developing countries. Climate change has led to food and water scarcity, increased poverty, and more frequent natural disasters. These impacts disproportionately affect marginalized communities who have little access to resources and lack the means to adapt to a changing climate. Developing world bears the brunt Despite the overwhelming evidence of capitalism's impact on climate change, many governments and corporations continue to prioritise profit over the environment. The Paris Agreement, which was signed by 196 countries in 2015, aims to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius. However, many of the world's largest emitters, including the United States and China, have failed to meet their commitments under the agreement. The devastating impact of industrialisation and capitalism on the environment and society, especially in developing countries, cannot be ignored. Developed nations have been exploiting the cheap labor and lax environmental regulations of these countries, using them as dumping sites for their hazardous waste and electronic garbage. While they have benefited from increased profit margins, developing countries are left to grapple with the environmental and health hazards caused by this unethical practice. Developed countries and multinational corporations have a dirty secret: they dump their waste and pollutants on developing countries. Electronic waste or e-waste is often shipped to these countries, and can contain toxic materials like lead, mercury, and cadmium. The impact of this waste on the soil, water, and air can be devastating. Unfortunately, countries like Ghana, Nigeria, and India have become dumping grounds for this waste, and workers there are forced to dismantle the electronics without proper protection from these harmful materials. The issue of e-waste Multinational corporations such as Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft have been accused of contributing to this problem by failing to properly dispose of their e-waste. In 2018, a study by the Basel Action Network found that electronic waste from these companies was being illegally exported to developing countries, where it was often dumped in landfills or burned, releasing toxic fumes into the air. Similarly, textile factories in developing countries such as Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Cambodia are contracted by multinational brands to produce clothing for the global market. However, these factories often release untreated wastewater into rivers and other bodies of water, contaminating the water supply and harming the health of local communities. In 2013, the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh killed over 1,100 people, mostly garment workers who were producing clothing for multinational corporations such as Walmart and Benetton. The building's collapse was caused by poor safety standards and overcrowding, which were driven by the demand for cheap clothing produced in developing cou

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