Cloning Computers: From Rights of Possession to Rights of Creation

摘要

Strathern shows how the 'hybrid embrace' promoted by intellectual property rights entails new practices of purification, while the right to intellectual property seeks its own new separations of Nature from Society (Strathern, 1999, p. 161). In the 1970s, Brazilian computer professionals, in defending what I have depicted as the incorporation of the unknown in the form of foreign technology (that is, artefacts which are the intellectual property of an author) into the unknown in Nature (that is, non-appropriated natural phenomena), committed what seemed to be an unbearable transgression in the imperial eyes of the colonizers. But they were, in fact, retracing the division between Nature (which expanded to encompass new entities or objects) and Society (which contracted to lose, for example, copyrights and patents), which is something that moderns are constantly doing (Latour, 1993). Thus, we may think about two Natures, one delineated by the colonized (computer professionals of Brazil) and the other by the colonizers (western international capital and technoscience): initially the former incorporates as natural objects the artefacts of foreign technology, while the latter denies that these are hybrid objects with complex boundaries. This is the case, even though the colonizers have succeeded in partially disentangling them to assign the corresponding rights to an author (creator). Neither of the two natures (nor their respective societies) refers to a definite entity given in a pre-discursive reality. In other words, the struggle for the fidelity of the allies of the colonizers may be displaced to new (more even and less violent?) spaces of negotiation by increasing the visibility of the ontological policing (surveillance and punishment) of the colonizer. Colonizers appeal to a transcendent Nature and repress other ontological possibilities in order to legitimate and impose specific social rules and hierarchies as universally legitimate behaviour.