In the current age of information capitalism, all forms of intellectual property are undergoing stress and transformation, creating new ambiguities of access and enclosure where the information market meets the democratic public. Versions of copyright, authorship, and patent protection from earlier media cultures are being pressed to new uses; forms of digital text, software, imagery and concepts are posing challenges to forms of property developed for printed books and mechanical inventions.

The CCA will sponsor several programs in 2005-2006 to encourage cross-disciplinary inquiry in Intellectual Property:

IP Across Old and New Media. This working group, headed by Prof. Paula McDowell (English) will ask how scholarship in the history of the book (on copyright, authorship, and codex-based forms of textual property, earlier “new media”) can help to understand the new formal mediations of digital culture, and vice versa.
Regulating Intellectual Property. This working group, headed by Prof. Greg Lastowka and Prof. Ellen Goodman (Rutgers Law School, Camden) will examine the different interests that govern the production, appropriation, and circulation of textual and informational forms. Under what paradigms have individuals, corporations, states, and other parties asserted their own claims and principles?
The Poetics of Circulation. This seminar series, organized by Michael Warner (English, CCA) will analyze the ways different norms and aesthetic canons—including property and piracy, but also related conceptions of originality, quotation, etc.—govern and regiment the circulation of cultural goods.

Director: Michael Warner
Faculty Fellows: Marija Dalbello (SCILS), Greg Lastowka (Law), Ellen Goodman (Law), Paula McDowell (English), Meredith McGill (English)
Predoctoral Fellows: Nellickal Jacob (English), Vanina Leschziner (Sociology), Nestor Pinillos (Philosophy), Megan Ward (English)
Postdoctoral Fellows: Gabriella Coleman (Anthropology, U. of Chicago), Daniel Fisher (Anthropology, NYU), Lisa Gitelman (Media Studies, Catholic U.)