Ownership of cultural expression: Speech & culture in the new intellectual property rights regime of the European Union

Abstract

This article offers a socio-legal argument that the emerging intellectual property rights regime of the European Union (EU) sweeps away constraints on proprietary accumulation of expression by altering notions of property rights over content in a way that would inhibit rather than stimulate the diversity of ideas, expressive forms, opinion, and representations of social reality in the Information Society. In order to understand the socio-legal significance of intellectual property rights in shaping and naturalizing the information age, the article explores unexamined premises in diverse political-legal models governing the production and diffusion of expression. The emerging EU and global intellectual property rights (IPR) regime is examined for the form in which it deals with a set of serious complexities in regulating content ownership rights in the construction of the information society, and for its approach to balancing the economic rights of the content industry as against the human rights of creative labor and the information rights of the public. This is illustrated in the transformation of the political and social aims of IPR at the global level and in EU policy and law. The article concludes by addressing the ascent of contractual law as an ordering principle regulating ownership rights over content in the public sphere of the information society.