“Culture Wars on the Net: Trademarks, Consumer Politics and Corporate Accountability on the World Wide Web”
“Culture Wars on the Net: Trademarks, Consumer Politics and Corporate Accountability on the World Wide Web”
“Culture Wars on the Net: Trademarks, Consumer Politics and Corporate Accountability on the World Wide Web” (with Andrew Herman), South Atlantic Quarterly 100: 919 – 947. Special issue on “Culture and the Law” edited by Gaurav Desai.
- Reprinted in William T. Gallagher, ed., Intellectual Property (a volume in the International Library of Essays in Law and Society, Aldershott: Ashgate Publishing, 2007) 579-608.
Link to article
Abstract: The function of trademark law is to discursively construct and institutionally enforce particular notions of corporate identity as a property right. Intellectual property laws structure a field of meaning-making and thereby shape forms of symbolic practice. They create proprietary rights in a cultural commodity or commodity-sign — the trademark — and capacities to control its potential meaning and interpretation. The interconnected relationship between property and propriety is examined through an array of examples: from contestations over domain names, absolute ownership over trademarks and censorship, the emergence of digital communities comprising fan subcultures, as well as others. Ultimately, the Web has emerged as a digital battleground for corporate trademarks driven by the strategic logic of commodity fetishism, and counterhegemonic expressions of creativity, cultural meaning and identity formation, consumer choice, and labor rights structured through a guerilla logic of the populace.
Date Published: 2001
Publisher: South Atlantic Quarterly
Publisher Website: https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly