Seminar I Copyright and commodification of language

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.