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Seminar I Copyright and commodification of language

Seminars / Lectures / Workshops

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  • Date

    09 May 2024

  • Organiser

    Department of English and Communication

  • Time

    17:00 - 18:00

  • Venue

    DE306 / Online via Zoom  

Speaker

Professor Joseph Park

Summary

In this talk, I approach intellectual property as a site for research on commodification of language. In particular, I focus on copyright as a case where ideological conceptions of language as abstract communicative code come to the fore in sustaining regimes of intellectual property. My discussion centers on the idea-expression distinction—a key doctrine in copyright law which asserts that copyright protects the expressive form of creative works, not the ideas behind them. Based on a linguistic anthropological perspective that highlights the interdiscursivity of communication, I consider why the idea-expression distinction becomes necessary in upholding the interdiscursive regime of copyright, and why challenges to the idea-expression distinction inevitably emerge due to the nature of language as socially embedded practice. Based on this, I propose an alternative way of conceptualizing language – language as doing – and how this may form a useful basis for critiquing intellectual property, and for refining our theorization of commodification of language.

Keynote Speaker

Professor Joseph Park

Professor Joseph Park

National University of Singapore

Joseph Sung-Yul Park is a Professor in the Department of English, Linguistics, and Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore. He is a sociolinguist working in the areas of linguistic anthropology and interactional linguistics, and his research focuses on various intersections of language, transnationalism, and neoliberalism. He is the author of The Local Construction of a Global Language: Ideologies of English in South Korea (Mouton de Gruyter, 2009), Markets of English: Linguistic Capital and Language Ideology in a Globalizing World (co-authored with Lionel Wee, Routledge, 2012), and In Pursuit of English: Language and Subjectivity in Neoliberal South Korea (Oxford, 2021).

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