Panel 1: Intellectual Property Rights and New Technologies: Pills, Pirates and Sex Dolls

• An inquiry into factors influencing Canadian policies related to pharmaceutical patents
  (view abstract)
  Jason Wenczler, Political Economy
• Noise Annoys: Pirate Radio and the Distribution of Music in the Digital Age
  (view abstract)
  Jim Dooley, Political Economy
• Marxxxist Alienation: Sexual Anthropomorphism of Realdolls™ and Construction of Man
  (view paper)
  Elizabeth Record, Political Economy
• North American Integration and Copyright Policy: The Case of Canada
  (view abstract)
  Blayne Haggart, Political Science
• Discussant: Eliot Che, Political Economy

Transcript: Commentary from the Discussant

Well, Blayne, it’s good to hear that my Facebook addiction did some good after all.

What I’d like to do now is take a minute to talk about some of the broader themes at play, and then make some more specific comments and ask some directed questions.

On the theme of questioning boundaries, these presentations drive us to rethink what it means to do political economy. In dealing with history and institutions; meanings and practices; or semiotic analysis, each of these papers is taking part in what is popularly known, at least in academic circles, as the ‘cultural turn’ in political economy. Of course, those in cultural studies like to call it the ‘return’ to culture in political economy, but that doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

For example, as Bob Jessop argues: “cultural political economy involves not only a materialist analysis, but also a discursive account of power.” Instead of naturalizing or reifying technical and economic objects, like machines, money or the informational economy, cultural political economy holds that these objects are always socially embedded or disembedded, historically specific and in constant need of social reproduction. By breaking down the social and cultural construction of boundaries between the economic and the political, the ‘cultural turn’ simply allows for a more comprehensive and multi-scalar critique of contemporary capitalism.

Now let me get to some comments and questions for the panelists - mainly questions!

Jason, first, let me say that I completely agree with your paper and the background piece you sent: as a 20 billion dollar/year industry in Canada affecting countless lives, the pharmaceutical industry most definitely requires some careful research and analysis. There are a couple questions that came up while I was listening to your presentation. It’s the news many of us have heard before - that due to a lack of anti-viral drugs, people are dying everyday in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, among many other places. In your paper, you note that Canadian patent laws allow for generic companies to manufacture and export drugs that are under patent, but since that amendment came into effect 3 years ago, not a single pill has been delivered to a developing country.

So, who do we point the finger to? Should pharmaceutical companies be concerned with, or responsible for the public good? What then, are some of the changes needed in order to get medicines to those most in need?

Both your paper and Blayne’s paper, though from different perspectives, address the issue of domestic governments acting regionally. In Jason’s case, the US government is acting regionally by influencing Canadian public policy and patent law. While Blayne is arguing that Canada is acting regionally by resisting US and international calls for copyright reform. So: domestic governments as regional political institutions: How effective? How desirable? How democratic?

Because, Blayne, in your paper you argue that domestic governments are more democratic in their decision-making processes. In terms of the Canadian copyright issue, Michael Geist has argued that there was no consultation by the Federal government with civil society, consumer groups or education groups before drafting the new reforms. Now, I wouldn’t argue that regional institutions are more democratic than domestic ones, but perhaps you can expand a bit on how responsive and accessible domestic governments are on issues like North American integration.

More fundamentally, maybe you can clarify what you see as being the role of a “regional political institution.” If we look at your particular case study - how is the Federal government’s lack of movement on copyright reform influencing policy outside or across Canadian borders? Finally, what does it mean to have regional economic integration without the kinds of regional social or political integration we’ve seen in the European Union? What effect will increased economic integration have on domestic political institutions and their ability to govern?

Jim, in preparing my comments on your paper, I decided to try downloading some music through a Bittorrent website - since I’d never done it before (of course). But when I tried accessing the site, all I got was a page that said: “Sorry, this site cannot be accessed by users in Canada due to CRIA legal threats” - which links back to Blayne’s paper. Whether you call it the virtual panopticon, or the society of control, new technologies transform the way piracy is done and the way the dissemination of information occurs.

In relation to this, I’m hoping you can explain a bit more about what kinds of changes the music industry has seen in the move from pirate radio in the 60s and 70s to peer to peer music sharing today, something you deal with more explicitly in your paper. Piracy has been happening for a long time - at least since the advent of movable type and the printing press and probably earlier. How are new, information technologies changing the game?

In your paper, you address a number of important questions: like the role of intellectual property in what Lawrence Lessig calls Free Culture; and whether online content can be monetized. I think another issue worth looking at is whether or not piracy can act as a public good. For example, linking back to Jason’s topic, Matt Mason states that India between 1970 and 2005, ignored western patents on many life-saving drugs, simply because they needed to save lives and couldn’t afford market prices. During that time, life expectancy went from 40 years up to the 64 years we see today. In terms of public good, the strategy worked, and the Western pharmaceutical companies did eventually come to the table with lower prices. With regards to the music industry, though not about life and death, depending on who you talk to, is there a parallel trend? How does this relate to your concept of “neo-scarcity” in a digital economy?

Finally, in terms of your paper, you’ve acknowledged that piracy is a loaded term: how do you distinguish between piracy for profit, through the selling of copied CDs for example, with free culture piracy? Is there a difference in terms of ethics or laws that govern these kinds of transactions?

In all these papers, a recurring theme is the political economy of control. Control over the production and distribution of pharmaceuticals, control over access to music and other artistic innovations, and in the case of Realdoll ownership, control over social life itself.

Elizabeth, after reading your paper, I just had to visit the Realdolls website - with my academic hat on of course - and I was amazed that the dolls, or nonhuman women, if I can use that term, look incredibly life-like. Like an x-rated version of Madame Toussaud’s museum. And a first question came to mind: In terms of control over social life, are Realdolls the logical extension of mail-order brides? But I’ll leave that question open and move on.

I think the concept of human-machine hybrids is an interesting one. Often we talk about making machines more human, so that they can be better integrated into our daily lives. What is often missed is another direction for social and cultural flows, where humans become more like machines. Hardt and Negri argue that much of the production based on new technologies results in humans who increasingly think like computers. This is seen in the concept of the flexible worker, who, like the artificial intelligence of a computer, can modify, self-regulate and perfect its operation based on interaction with its user and environment, only acting when called upon. Now, to me, that sounds a lot like what Realdolls do.

Then, on a website called Feministe, one person argues: “Screwing a sex toy is fine by me. Calling it your girlfriend and wishing that real women were like dolls is not” So, what is the social or cultural status of a Realdoll? Is it a human-machine hybrid in the same ways that we are? Is there or should there be an alternative system of ethics when considering interactions with or between human-machine hybrids?

Your paper argues that the boundaries are increasingly blurred between what constitutes a human and what constitutes a machine; where they merge in the construct of a cyborg. From your quoting of Haraway, “copies without originals may be a highly attractive solution to avoid perpetuating the mistakes of humankind.” I was hoping you could expand on this, since an argument from Deleuze, drawing on Henri Bergson, is the idea that “originals without copies” is part of what it means to be human.

In Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, she argues that there isn’t anything about being female that naturally binds women together into a unified category. That there isn’t even such a state as ‘being’ female, “itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices.” I can see how Haraway mobilizes the cyborg concept as a challenge to both capitalism and essentialist feminism, but I wonder what role the Realdoll plays in all this. Is the Realdoll one of those social practices that contribute to what it means to becoming female?

Anyways, it looks like they are working on animatronic versions of the Realdoll, similar to the Reborn product line of life-like nonhuman babies that imitate the movement of breathing, which might be worth looking into. Of course, in this case, there are no diapers to change, no crying and no waking up in the middle of the night.

Meanwhile, futurist Ray Kurzweil argues that we will have machines with human intelligence, including emotional intelligence by 2029. While intelligence researcher David Levy argues that a person will legally marry a robot within the next 45 years. Is this the birth of the nuclear, silicone, human-hybrid family - of parents and their 2.5 children?

Just to tie things up, we’ve looked at the copying of music and the copying of pharmaceuticals; at intellectual property in terms of both continental and social integration. We’ve talked about the manufacture of both generic drugs and generic nonhuman women. When we consider these new patterns of production and consumption, do they constitute a challenge to, or a transformation of contemporary capitalism? After all, this is a political economy conference. Should we say “evolution” or “revolution”?

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Cultural Shifts is shifting things around.
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Eliot Che is a researcher and web developer. He studies the political implications of technological transformation and the social effects of virtual space.
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