Public domain and the new world order in knowledge

This is an electronic version of an article published in Social Semiotics. © Copyright 2001 Taylor & Francis; Social Semiotics is available online at http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/10350330.aspThe General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the World Intellectual Property Organization negotiations in 1997 and, currently, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment are the legal instruments for the globalization and deregulation of international trade. My paper focuses on some of their implications for the free circulation of knowledge. For, if the rhetoric of globalization is all about the freeing-up of access to and the removal of regulatory controls from formerly restrictive and protected industries, one of the effects of these new legal regimes has, nevertheless, been to institute increasingly severe restrictions on cultural flows. Common to all of them is the fact that they define knowledge as property, and then seek to map out an appropriate regime of property rights. The restriction of illegal copying of software and of audio- and video-recordings , and the enforcement of patents on biological, agro-chemical and pharmaceutical patents are the leading edge of this new wave of incursions into the public domain that is supposedly protected by intellectual property law; with the extension of patent law to previously exempt areas, with strong moves towards the protection of facts in databases, and with the erosion of fair use exemptions, the very notion of a public domain of knowledge from which writers, artists, scientists and scholars can draw is seriously threatened