In a piece in The Guardian today, Anish Kapoor is quoted as saying: "Only poetry and the more serious classical music seem able to resist becoming commodities." He admits that he has benefitted from "neo-liberalist commodification", and indeed few artists can have done as well as him out of it, but even so he doesn't make it sound like a good thing. Which I guess he doesn't think it is.
Commodification is not a necessary consequence of copyright (or more generally intellectual property) protection. What the world of commerce needs is proprietary rights:
So, to make intellectual property tradeable it is commodified - turned into objects of trade. "Commodification" is a term used in Marxist theory, where it denotes the process of giving an economic value to something that it didn't have already, by producing it and presenting it for sale rather than just consuming it oneself. It's different from commoditization, which is a term found in business literature to denote the process by which goods that have economic value and can be distinguished by their attributes - their uniqueness or brand - become simple commodities in the eyes of the market or consumers. Here, the meaning of "commodities" is somewhat different from the Marxian one: the word denotes goods that have full or substantial fungibility (a great word), meaning that the market doesn't care who produced them, as one person's commodities are much the same as another person's.
So it seems to me that commodification is an essential result, or perhaps a goal, of copyright protection, whereas commoditization is what intellectual property laws (trade marks probably play a more important role here than copyright) are designed to prevent. Kapoor can earn a living (a very good one, I imagine) because his work is commodified, but it would be incorrect to consider his creations as commodities because they are readily distinguishable from the works of other artists. Ineed, I can see an argument for saying that anything that can be labelled a commodity in the second sense mentioned above should not receive any form of protection from intellectual property laws (by which I mean, in the trade marks field, that purely descriptive or non-distinctive trade marks like BREAD for bread must not be registrable, not that bakers should be denied access to the trade marks system altogether).
This is an aspect of intellectual property law about which I am developing my thoughts, so please excuse any half-bakedness in this posting. Any comments would be gratefully received.
Commodification is not a necessary consequence of copyright (or more generally intellectual property) protection. What the world of commerce needs is proprietary rights:
The merchant must have property in the things in which he trades, his rights to that property must be identifiable, When he sells an article he must be able to assure the buyer that the things is his to sell; he must be able to prove his property in it, if he is challenged. (Hicks, A Theory of Economic History, OUP, 1969, p.34).It is true as much for intangibles as for tangible things. Argubly, a far-reaching law prohibiting unfair competition could do the job of all IP laws, but giving them the status of property rights probably makes them much more useful - much more tradeable, and available for use as security - than a mere right of action against an unfair competitor would be.
So, to make intellectual property tradeable it is commodified - turned into objects of trade. "Commodification" is a term used in Marxist theory, where it denotes the process of giving an economic value to something that it didn't have already, by producing it and presenting it for sale rather than just consuming it oneself. It's different from commoditization, which is a term found in business literature to denote the process by which goods that have economic value and can be distinguished by their attributes - their uniqueness or brand - become simple commodities in the eyes of the market or consumers. Here, the meaning of "commodities" is somewhat different from the Marxian one: the word denotes goods that have full or substantial fungibility (a great word), meaning that the market doesn't care who produced them, as one person's commodities are much the same as another person's.
So it seems to me that commodification is an essential result, or perhaps a goal, of copyright protection, whereas commoditization is what intellectual property laws (trade marks probably play a more important role here than copyright) are designed to prevent. Kapoor can earn a living (a very good one, I imagine) because his work is commodified, but it would be incorrect to consider his creations as commodities because they are readily distinguishable from the works of other artists. Ineed, I can see an argument for saying that anything that can be labelled a commodity in the second sense mentioned above should not receive any form of protection from intellectual property laws (by which I mean, in the trade marks field, that purely descriptive or non-distinctive trade marks like BREAD for bread must not be registrable, not that bakers should be denied access to the trade marks system altogether).
This is an aspect of intellectual property law about which I am developing my thoughts, so please excuse any half-bakedness in this posting. Any comments would be gratefully received.
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