Three Ways To Think of Digital Objects as Property
* Article: From Commons to NFTs: Digital objects and radical imagination. by Felix Stalder. The Makery, January 2022
Description
"Digital culture has always been a source of radical social imagination. And in a capitalist society, there is little that is more radical than redefining property relations. Over the last 50+ years, there have been three ways to think of digital objects – blobs of data, software code, informational ‘content’ – as property.
- Either as intellectual property (first as copyright, later also as patents),
- communal property (under free licenses),
- or as “authenticated copies” (blockchain-based non-fungible tokens, NFTs).
Property relations shape all aspects of society and culture and with each of these imagined forms, distinct social visions are being advanced. The vision expressed through intellectual property is structurally conservative, foregrounding firms producing commodities and artists marketed as individual geniuses. The push for communal property and for “authenticated copies”, however, contains quite radical breaks with the status quo — and quite radically different ones. While it is not impossible that yet another way of organizing the digital as property might emerge in the future (who knows?), at this historical moment, communal property vs authenticated copies are the ones through which radical departures are formulated. Not necessarily for the better, though."
Excerpts
By Felix Stalder:
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References:
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