PhD student Gabe Menard is the 2016 recipient of the Daniel G. Hill Prize for the Best Graduate Paper in Sociology. This award is presented annually to an Ontario resident graduate student and is chosen on the basis of the quality of a paper published between July and June of the award year.
Gabe received the award for his paper, “Copyright, Digital Sharing, and the Liberal Order: Sociolegal Constructions of Intellectual Property in the Era of Mass Digitization.” which was published earlier this year in Information, Communication & Society. This paper grew out of the paper Gabe wrote in the Second-year Research Practicum course; we featured it earlier in our From Practicum to Publication series. We have pasted the citation and abstract below.
Gabriel Menard
Information, Communication & Society Vol. 19 , Iss. 8,2016
Abstract
Intellectual property (IP) rights policy has long been driven by rights-holder interests, leading to IP regimes focused on protecting private property at the expense of broadening public access to cultural works. The rise of instant, low-cost digital sharing practices, however, forces the sociolegal construction of IP as ‘property’ into crisis by contradicting the conception of creative works as commodities that can be exclusively ‘owned’ and exchanged. This cuts into a classic social science debate over how best to balance individual rights against collective interests, which has played out in liberal society through tensions between contradictory principles seeking to uphold the sanctity of private property (the principle of ‘Individual Freedom’) while also correcting social inequality (the ‘Equal Means’ principle). While IP policy has historically developed largely in accordance with Individual Freedom, digital sharing of creative works is premised instead on Equal Means. As these forces collide, the question at stake is whether crisis in the status quo conception of property rights disrupts existing power relations, with implications for the logic of policy development in the digital age. To address this question, I test for continuity of the predominant trend in IP policy-making using recent legislative changes to the Canadian copyright regime. I find that, contrary to expectations, policy changes do not manifestly favor rights-holders. Rather, legislative outcomes are split between modest protections for rights-holders and clear gains for rights of open access. I take this as evidence of the increasing complexification of IP policy in response to mass digitization.