Information biopolitics: copyright law and the regulation of life in the network society

Abstract

ABSTRACT Online settings illustrate our truest passing into the information age, with cultural development and social relationships being mediated exclusively via ‘palpable’ digital information artefacts, like texts, images, videos, webpage links and social networking accounts. Suspended between its intangible nature and its various ‘tangible’ expressions, and according to Drahos constituting ‘the daily lifeblood of human agents as communicating beings’, information regulated under familiar legal conceptions of property suggests arguably ‘biopolitical’ developments: the hold, which one exerts on information items, extends to administering essentially life in its social and cultural aspects. The propertisation of information in copyright laws authorises long-term exercises of power that, in future, computer-mediated societies, could both undercut circulation of vital knowledge and structure the public’s participation in culture, thus interfering effectively with the development of personal, social and political identities. Such concerns appear more plausible considering the increase of corporate power across online settings, contested between concentrations of copyright-intensive industries and web hosting giants, and following debates over the impacts of laws like the recent EU Directive 2019/790. By reviewing copyright law developments, this paper reflects on Foucauldian biopolitics understandings and media ecology theoretical interpretations, to comment critically on the regulation of information and online public interaction spaces.