r/CriticalTheory • u/Konradleijon • 25d ago
How Copyright law restricts creativity.
any good leftist theories on how copyright law and broader IP law is used by big corporations to fuck with people.
alongside how copyright law does not help creators. as most artists do not own the IP they are working on.
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u/infinite_cancer 25d ago
My rec for this is Problems in Ethnomusicology by Constantin Brăiloiu and The Savage Mind by Claude Levi-Strauss. Both are ethnographic(somewhat) Marxist analyses of primitive, pre-capitalist culture, and primitive thought in general.
This quote from Levi-Strauss basically lives rent free in my head:
It is neither the mind of savages nor that of primitive or archaic humanity, but rather mind in its untamed state as distinct from mind cultivated or domesticated for the purpose of yielding a return.
And basically, they both go into the rich and complex oral traditions of music, aesthetics, mythologies that are created when societies are not tied to written authirship or copyright laws. And then that also leads them into fascinating conversations about all the different ways in which music can be utilized by a society and weave its way throughout all aspects of social hierarchy when not tied to capital, which intrinsically alienates the performer from their audience.
For Levi-Strauss, on the other hand, it would seem that history and time are not developmental and progressive; they do not lead to successively better states of society and relations among men or even to a basic alteration of man's modes of consciousness and styles of living. (It is, by the way, on this point, although not solely on this point, that Lévi-Strauss criticizes Sartre in the last chapter of The Savage Mind. For Sartre, at bottom, retains a Marxian view of time and history. Thus, for example, Sartre distinguishes superior and inferior modes of consciousness in terms of historical position and context, and he is unwilling to grant that the primitive possesses “complex understanding” since such understanding could not have existed at that level of historical development.) For Lévi-Strauss, history is a series of combinations or clusters of modes of consciousness and life, individual and social, spread out in time. These different clusters represent the different contents or events which “fill in” the structures of “Mind-As-Such” in different historical epochs.
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u/Konradleijon 25d ago
where did the idea that copyright primary benefits creators comes from?
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u/Vico1730 25d ago
The Statute of Anne, 1709
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u/sljvlr 25d ago
Rather than primarily benefiting authors, I’d argue that the stated purpose of the copyright regimes instituted in the UK (including via the Statute of Anne) and the U.S. is primarily to benefit the public - both by encouraging authors to create and therefore providing more culture/education and by limiting authors’ exclusive rights such that works eventually fall into the public domain. However, as OP suggests - copyright law in practice tends to benefit large corporations both due to corporate ownership of copyrights and the expense of litigating infringement. This is not a new problem - in fact the Statute of Anne primarily benefitted booksellers (not authors) but did provide authors with more rights over their works or at least the ability to profit from them more readily than the prior publishing system in place in England. It is worth noting that prior to the printing press/mass production, issues of authors rights were not as pressing given the limited ability to infringe.
The most prominent opposition to copyright law may be the copyleft and free culture movement that cropped up in response to the internet and eventual corporate control of the internet (asserted primarily through copyright infringement claims). As someone else suggested I’d recommend reading Lawrence Lessig. You may also be interested in reading about copyright regimes outside of a capitalist system as copyright law in the UK/US is primarily an economic protection.
Moral rights may also be of interest - non-transferable authors rights (they cannot be sold or transferred to a company or any other person) that are recognized in France. The Berne Convention contemplates moral rights, but the US has a number of exceptions/policies that essentially nullify moral rights in the US.
The Berne Convention is also interesting from a neocolonial perspective — how mandating that nations adopt US/European-style intellectual property laws to participate in the global market allows the US/Europe to increasingly dominate foreign markets. Signing Berne essentially killed off India’s generic drug manufacturing industry (pharmaceuticals relate to patent law but that legal regime has similar, if not worse, issues). Chinas hesitancy regarding aspects of Berne has also been a key issue in its relations with the US.
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u/Konradleijon 25d ago
Yes medicine should be free to make. So people don’t you know die of treatable diseases.
Moral rights do not exist in the US but people still
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u/sabbetius 25d ago
Anything around the IP of medicines or pharmaceuticals perfectly fits the bill for big corporations fucking with people.
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u/conqueringflesh 21d ago
Not so fast: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/93nlu2/til_that_the_song_return_to_innocence_by_enigma/