There Is Always More than Law! From Low IP Regimes to a Governance Perspective in Copyright Research

Authors

• Christian Katzenbach

Document Type

Article

Abstract

This Essay contributes to empirical copyright research by presenting an integrated governance perspective. This conceptual framework seeks to enable the identification and comparison of different modes of ordering and control in creative production and distribution. Based on sociological institutionalism, this governance perspective does not privilege law ex-ante, but positions norms, discourses, and technology as (analytically) equally relevant dimensions of copyright governance.

The reasoning of this Essay is presented in three parts. Firstly, I draw from Murray to argue against a low IP exceptionalism. The norms and routines ordering creative production in sectors of low IP protection are not unique to these sectors. Instead, they are constitutive of all processes of creative production. Norms and routines are not mere replacements for legal measures in a “negative space of IP.” Instead, it is argued that they are always already present in every form of cultural production and circulation. Thus, the ordering of creative production and circulation is a multimodal process that is realized in many dimensions. Secondly, this perspective is developed into a conceptual framework based on sociological institutionalism (SI) with four modalities of copyright governance: (1) a regulative dimension, addressing the provision and enforcement of formal rules, such as laws, court decisions, terms of services; (2) a normative dimension, investigating the prevalent assumptions about legitimate and illegitimate behavior in a specific community or sector; (3) a discursive dimension, addressing the framings and debates on creativity, authorship, and originality; and (4) a technological dimension that investigates the embodiment of affordances and rules in infrastructures, devices, and algorithms relevant to creative work. This will allow the empirical study of the impact and mutual relations of the different modalities across creative sectors. Finally, to illustrate this concept, the paper discusses the implications of this model for existing case studies on low IP regimes and other sectors.

Recommended Citation

Christian Katzenbach, There Is Always More than Law! From Low IP Regimes to a Governance Perspective in Copyright Research, 22 J. Tech. L. & Pol'y (2017).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/jtlp/vol22/iss2/2