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Dagmar Schafer, "Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property" (MIT Press, 2023)
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It's a historically hideous season.
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It's our 100th ugly house.
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And if these walls could talk.
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Do you cry a lot? I do. Ugliest house in America Season premiere Wednesday at 8 on HGTV.
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D
Welcome to the Library Science Channel on New Books Network. Today I'm joined by Degmar Schaefer, Annapurna Mimidipuri and Marius Buning, editors of Ownership of Knowledge Beyond Intellectual Property, published by MIT Press in 2023. Scholars of science, technology, medicine and law have all tended to emphasize knowledge as the sum of human understanding and its ownership as possession by law. Breaking with traditional discourse on knowledge property as something that concerns mainly words and intellectual history, or science, and ownership of Knowledge Beyond Intellectual Property proposes technology as a central heuristic for studying the many implications of knowledge ownership. Toward this end, this book focuses on the notions of knowledge and ownership in courtrooms, workshops, policy and research practices, while also shedding light on scholarship itself as a powerful tool for making explicit the politics inherent in knowledge practices and social order. Dagmar, Annapurna and Marius, welcome to New Books Network. And before we turn to talking about your book, I would love if each of you could introduce yourselves. Maybe you know what your interests are, your research interests, and what your education journey has been and where you're currently based. Dagmar, if you'd like to start.
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B
Yes. Thank you so much for having us. And thank you so much for giving us the opportunity to introduce our book to you community. So my name is Doug Machefer. I am actually a historian of technology and Sinology by training, so Chinese studies. And from that perspective I've started to look into the history of science. That's basically all I can say. And that's how I actually became interested also in the question of ownership and knowledge. Both because there is, I think, something that historians contribute to it and that they are actually not aware of, and because as a historian, historian of science, I'm very interested in the dynamics of knowledge dissemination in general.
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D
Thank you. Anna Purna, would you like to go next?
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B
Yeah.
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C
Hi. So I trained as an engineer and worked in an NGO for many years, working with crafts people, mostly handloom weavers, and then went on to do a PhD in STS talking about handloom weaving as a kind of socio technology. And since I work a lot with people who are very knowledgeable, but are not seen as being knowledgeable but having labor, I was looking for. I found a community in historians of technology and historians of science because. Because their subjects are also craftspeople in many ways. So I found it easy to talk to them. So. So that's how I come to be here.
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D
Amazing. Thank you. Marius.
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E
Hi. I'm an assistant professor of early modern history at the University of Oslo, where I mainly work on the history of intellectual property rights in Irman, Europe. And I guess I'm interested in the transformative impact that the law has as a switching point between knowledge production and processes of state formation.
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D
Fantastic.
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B
Thanks.
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D
So then I guess turning to this new book, Ownership of Knowledge, I'm really curious about how this project came to be and what the main goals were that you had for this book. And Annapurna, maybe we could start with you.
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C
Well, it started for me with a project that was already ongoing, going with. Between with Dagmar and Marius. They were talking about intellectual property, going beyond intellectual property. And we had a conference to which I was also invited. And there were legal historians and there were other scholars who actually were looking at different regimes of knowledge ownership. And it seemed it was quite clear that these two communities were not communicating to each other. And so I think all three of us were concerned about that. And so. But we had very different entry points. Mine was that, yeah, these people don't get it. We have to tell them what it's all about. And then I. I wrote to Dagmar and she said, well, then come on over and let's get together and see what we can do about that conversation. So that's where it started for me.
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D
Amazing. Dagmar, I'd love to hear your perspective on how all of that started.
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B
Yeah, thank you. I mean, actually, it started with Annapurna and me sitting across each other in a glass office business building and realizing that we were all. Both were working very hard and had something in common. And we only realized after having a couple of conversations where this common interest actually was, namely in the way in which we are workers on knowledge, or like, we think about knowledge communities a lot. And we were both very frustrated in the way in which it is discussion. Ownership is taken from people through our work. Yeah. So that we are kind of also responsible for it. And so how do you actually stop that as a historian, as an NGO worker, as somebody who looks at the sciences from law? And actually, I think the idea took form as I tried to force Annapurna on a bicycle and take a ride to. Through, like, across, like, basically along the Michigan lake. And I think that's where the idea really began to. Yeah. To thrive.
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E
Yeah.
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D
Fantastic. Marius, I'm curious how you took part in the start of this.
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E
Yeah, I can only follow up on. Agree with what the other said. So I normally work with, I guess, people, historians of law or people really work on the legal aspects of things. And then during this conference and also afterwards, we were talking a lot about how to challenge that narrative and how to go, indeed, beyond intellectual property.
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D
And.
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E
Yeah, that's how it all got started. And I think what interested me most was also the political aspect of the political stance of the scholar and all this. So what's the role of us as scholars in this discussion? And then I just rolled along.
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B
Yeah.
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D
And I know we will get to talking about the role of scholars, but in the preface and the first chapter, you've laid out this foundation for the rest of the book. So first you write about the concept of what is knownable, tying together what is knowable and what's ownable. And then you present a theoretical chapter that explores how we can understand all the different ways that knowledge is made property. So could you speak a little more about how you arrived at this idea of the knownable, and then explain the foundation that your theoretical framework lays out. I'm not sure which of you wants to. Which wants to start on that.
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C
Well, I know for sure that it was Dagmar who first said nonable. So I think you should answer this.
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B
Yeah, I'm not entirely sure if I can actually really get that together again, but I think the example in the introduction of our book at least very much summarizes it for me. So this, this idea of whether you ride a bicycle or whether you. You do something as a scientist or a craftsman, there are these three sides or like these many facets of knowing something with your body, through your mind, through your hands, right? You need, if you really comprehend something, so Chinese philosophy says, if it's innate, then you have to really grasp it. You have to be able to reiterate it, right? To, to put it into words, to, to, to perform it, right. So to have all these facets directly at your hands. And so that's when you really have knowledge. So you have it and then you give it away to somebody else. Like when I try to convince Annapurna to ride with the bike, right. Even though she, I think she mentioned at one point, like, I'm not riding the bike, but she made it, right? So she performs it. She has the bicycle, she uses the instrument. You are, you have a materiality to what you actually know with your body, right? It's like all these things are actually there. And that's when you are able, able to know. And then it's when you're able to know, you're also able to own it and to give it away and to share it with somebody else. So I think the enlightenment trap is somehow, that's where I had this awareness of recognition of, like, so we have it, but we think having it and owning it and giving it away are two things. How can that actually be? And why are we actually doing that? And I think that's where the insight was born that there is something really very strange in the way in which we always fragment knowledge and always know how to emphasize these different fragments of having knowledge. Why are we doing that when we know that knowledge is such a comprehensive category? Maybe you guys can fill in. I hope this was not too philosophical.
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D
That was really helpful. Yeah. If one of you would like to add to that.
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C
Yeah, I think that. So dogma always starts with the know. Noble. And I always start with the knowable and the ownable and then try and say it's not really fitting, you know, and, and this has been a constant way for us to refine, you know, what we mean by the knowable, which actually emerge very strongly from the. Each of the cases. So you have, you know, every one of those cases fits very nicely into how people actually manipulate, manipulate the knowable into turning into the knowable and the ownable. And for myself, I have a very clear place from which what is considered having knowledge and what is considered owning knowledge just don't fit with craftspeople. So you, you have the knowledge of weaving a particular motive, but you don't own the right to weave it because it's cultural property and anybody can weave it. So, so you've created this, this regime that we have of knowledge ownership doesn't actually fit their way of the known. So that's a very clear position from which I could look or look for the knowable from knowing that it exists, but it's being fragmented.
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D
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
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B
Thank you.
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D
Marius. Is there anything that you want to add to that in the framework came out there?
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E
No, not really. I think it was well put. I mean, I think for me it's, it's, it's. It's essentially boils down to something very simple that, that we often talk of, of even objects, or whatever it is as being either owned or, or known. And, and we tend to neglect the other side. So one cannot talk about something, an object, for instance, and just by talking about ownership without discussing its epistemology and vice versa. So it's a very funny, straightforward logic, so to say that the two are always intrinsically linked. And I hope that this book shows that as well to readers and the scholarly community as well.
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D
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It asks us to, like, remember the whole, the whole spectrum of that. So then, chapters two through ten of this book present a variety of case studies by several contributors. And I don't want to ask any of you to speak on behalf of those contributors, although if there's contributions you'd like to highlight, please do. But you also wrote or co authored some of these case studies, and I thought we could maybe focus on those. In the first section, looking at knowledge ownership within book publishing. Marius, your chapter here explores how our current framework of intellectual property has developed. So could you share some of that history with listeners and some of the biases and assumptions that you point out this historic narrative is relying on?
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E
Sure. So what I did in that case study was to look at the way in which law students are being taught the history of intellectual property law. So I looked at the selection of textbooks that are used at university universities and especially at the rhetorical strategies that are being used to create a sort of continuity between past and present. And, well, one of the things I found, for instance, is that that actually the way that that story is being told very much Resembles the way in which, borrowing a bit from neurotology, the way in which. In which fairy tales are told. So there's a sort of a stable situation, then there are external forces that change the situation, and then we end up in new st. Stable situation. And that's the way that. That history is being plotted out. Well, what surprised me is that therefore there's certain aspects that get more emphasis and others less so. So there's this sort of natural expansion of the law if you read those books. Essentially the story of, you know, how it became modern and, you know, it makes a lot of sense from a legal perspective. So, I mean, these are. These are all very good books written by excellent scholars that are teaching law students that have this very specific fun. But I guess I was still surprised about this, this. This divide between what Maitland called the logic of history and the logic of the law. So historians want to see things in there in its context, whereas lawyers actually only are interested or tend to be interested in the present. And history is just a stepping stone for modernity. And. Yeah, well, that. That impacts a lot the way in which we think of what that can be owned. So this is not just a story of ownership of knowledge, but also the knowledge of ownership, so to say. And. And that's what I wanted to point out in this article, or that's what I wanted to study in this chapter.
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D
Yeah. And it's so interesting to, you know, take that back to how we are teaching people like this examination of textbooks. I found that really, really fascinating. And then the second group of case studies looks at different practices that are used to authorize knowing and owning, with examples ranging from textile creation to grade school science experiments and Annapurna. I would love if you could speak about the chapter you co authored here with Viren Murthy about performance practice of contemporary classical music in South India. I really love how you point out that raga is a form of knowledge. So I could. I would love if you could share about this example and those conclusions you arrived at and how all of this exemplifies practice and social context as a legitimate way of owning knowledge.
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C
Okay, I was saying that I would like to start a little bit with the section that we have there, because we actually introduced the three practices of knowledge ownership in that section. And the point is that we think of them usually as ways of knowing, but what we are really putting forward here is that they are also ways of owning knowledge. So if we have these three material instantiations, the word, body and object, and we are talking Particularly in this section about how knowledge is, how knowledge works when it's predominantly working, authorized by naming, and when it's authorized in an object, the ownership, or when in a body. And of course, all the cases have all three together because that's how it works. But this helps us to kind of look at how, you know, different regimes actually work. So if you're someone who's working with objects, then the, you know, the case about, you know, the object that Java Batik would make more sense, for example. And, you know, if you're more interested in what happens with pedagogy in a classroom, then Amy Slayton's case is, is really good for that. I mean, it's really communicates. So the thing with the music chapter, of course, I wrote it with my co author Viren, and there's a raging controversy right now in the music world, in the Carnatic music world, about the dominance of a particular caste group who seem to have, who are now some of them accusing themselves of having appropriated that knowledge. But even in that debate, there is a clear problem of separating the noble and the ownable. So Viren and I wondered how that case would look like if we said, well, you know, if the, if the knowledge is performed as music is, then the ownership is through performance. You, you perform what you know, and that's how you have that knowledge. Then the knowledge is located in bodies and relationships. Right. So the way in which it will operate, the inclusion and exclusion will happen through how bodies include and exclude. So you, you belong to a certain cast or to a certain club. And by social inclusion, you can also include epistemically or you exclude socially and you've created epistemic exclusion. So that's what we were trying to show in that case.
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D
Yeah, thank you. And I think that, yeah, that tension between ownership and knowledge was really, really apparent to me there. And folks who might not claim ownership, having space maybe to recognize that there is ownership that comes along with their knowledge. Yeah. Asks a lot of interesting questions of us. And then moving to the third group of case studies, these explore how domains of society and economy have consequences for knowledge ownership. And Dagmar, you wrote here a chapter that looks at ownership of craft knowledge in pre modern China. What types of practices existed at this time for legitimizing and owning knowledge? And how did those practices work to shift and build or erase power? How did naming become a way to regulate craft work?
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B
Yes, absolutely. I think it's the piece why Annapurna always says, like names are so important for historians. Of China because the literati, so the scholars actually name everything. And that's because they can name it. They can actually own what they know. And I wanted to emphasize how this in Chinese history has been mobilized over centuries and also meant that in Chinese history you don't find really copyright laws. Right. So there's a very popular book by William Alford saying, like, to steal a book is an elegant offense. I think Cynthia Broca in the book really very nicely shows how you can own the wood block. But Chinese scholars always believe, like, if you are not able to grasp the knowledge, it doesn't help that you read a book. Right. That's still not. That doesn't mean that you know it. But it's also a great strategy to disown all those people who don't know how to manipulate words. Right. And manipulate namings. And I think the. The long arc that you can see to that, for instance, in. In modern Chinese history is the way in which modern China deals with brands or trademarks or the idea of. Of having a long history of copyright. So they have to really. Or for. Let me. Let me take the. The example of the craftspeople that Annapurna was talking about. There are like, of actual very prolific craftsmen, engineer or scientists that we know of. They always disappear in the collective. And it's the literati who define what kind of expertise these people actually have. So whether they are tanners or weavers or reelers or what kind of tasks they're actually performing. So by not naming those people and not allowing their individuality to show, modern China can claim, for instance, a local cultural heritage of, for instance, Gingerzhan porcelain producers or makers and can do as if this is a commonly shared craft and not. Does not need the attribution to individuals. Right? So you make it cultural heritage, but you don't make it part of, for instance, an engineering story, as you would do that in the German landscape through the Prussian times, when actually in Dresden or elsewhere, people in Meissen started to really discover and invent new techniques of porcelain. So you see, you have an entirely different history because historians and philosophers and scholars at that point in time were focusing on different ways of manipulating knowledge through their words, through their descriptions, through their documentation. And I wanted to show that and say that, like, look here, if historians then claim that China doesn't have ways to own historical ways to own knowledge or to manipulate it, and it was not part of law, you are missing part of the story. You don't see what actually happened. You don't need laws to manipulate how people can own knowledge. And that's a story a lot of anthropologists have told as well.
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E
Right.
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B
In the contemporary world. But I see there is a certain way of thinking about it, and if you don't really break out of these ways of thinking, then you always end up in the same trap.
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D
Absolutely. Yeah. And I thought that was such a vivid example of how social practices can erase specific people, erase specific kinds of expertise and knowledge making. Yeah. And so then you wrap up this book with a section on how the work of scholarship itself impacts knowledge and ownership. It legitimizes knowers and turns other people into not knowers. And then you share some tools for analyzing the relationships of ownership and knowledge. And actually, Marius, you referred a little bit at the top of this episode to, you know, implications for scholars and scholarship. So I don't know if you want to start off here just sharing with us a little bit more about the tools and ideas you hope readers take away from this book in terms of their own scholarship, but also how they look at existing scholarship or quote, unquote knowledge, what is deemed knowledge, what you hope this book will add to existing conversations and new conversations it might start.
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E
Yeah, sure. So I think Annapurna is better positioned to answer the question on the last chapter. But my hope for others that they take away from this book, I guess, you know, this is written for community of stories of science, technology, STS scholars, that they take this question of ownership more seriously to begin with and in some cases of the law, but doesn't always have to be the law. So I mean, I'm not talking about legal history, so not about legal doctrine, but rather how legal technologies or technologies of the law actually affect and I would say shape also the type of knowledge that is being produced. So how this knowledge gets legitimized in a rather literal sense. So, yeah, that's my hope. It's always good to have hope that others will take inspiration and continue with more case studies also along the lines that the 13 proposed in the book.
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D
Thanks, Annapurna. Do you want to add to that and tell us a little more about that concluding chapter?
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C
I think like Dagmar Said Said, you know, you identify the problem, you say, well, naming is not going to do it if you want to understand ownership of knowledge. But there is, there are these deep rooted oppositions that we work with that somehow when it's in words, there's an abstraction and there's epistemology. But if you're talking about objects and bodies, then it's material, it's social. So somehow there is an open opposition. It's almost like material and social cannot be knowledge. They can be sources of knowledge, but, you know, they. They can't be sites of ownership of knowledge. So we have these divisions very much in our head. So what we tried to do in that chapter was say, okay, if we treat words, bodies, objects, all as. On. On equal terms, as kind of instantiations of either ownership or of knowledge or sites of knowledge, then what can we come up with with. So naming becomes as material a practice, as performance and use. And performance and use generate as much abstraction as naming. And what that gives us, and that's what we want to use the chapter for as a tool, is encourage scholars to also look at existing material practices and social arrangements as also places where you can mine for understanding knowledge ownership and not just alongside the text. So I think that's what that chapter is trying to do.
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D
Thanks so much, Dagmar. Is there anything you would add there about what new conversations you hope this starts or how you hope it impacts scholarship?
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B
I should probably first say, like, that at least Annapon and I, and sometimes Marius as well, were really struggling over this last part. And there were two people who helped us a lot, Vivek and Jon. Yeah, who helped us a lot to think that through, right. To give people this tool. And at some point I was really mad at Annapurna because she put all these diagrams there and it made it even more complicated. Then she made it easy again. But we had a lot of fun producing them. But what I really want to say is I think there is. I mean, I really want all knowledge workers and I think we all are somehow, especially those of us who stand very high right. In the hierarchy of knowledge making. Scientists, historians, sociologists. I want them to realize, realize how much power they actually have and what they are doing sometimes with words. I mean, very often I'm coming from the discipline of history and I hear a lot of colleagues saying, like, we have no power. And I think actually we do. We destroy systems and we also keep them up, right? And we make them going and continue even though we are unhappy with them. And I think alerting us all to this fact and really saying, like, look, we could do it really differently. There is. Etc, like there's a real. There's a huge impact with work we are doing. Being a librarian, being a scientist, being whatever position you are actually in. Because our modern world is like fun, like knowledge is so important to it, right. It's really driving our economy, our societies and our Cultures we understand ourselves as these knowledge workers. And I want them to be very careful with that and I want them to really seriously think that to what they're doing and then be very conscientious with like what they are doing. Because I think, I think in the production of that book and we had a lot of people challenging us with like, but this is not unknownable or this is not an ownable. And there is no conditioning really going on. And I would like to challenge everybody who's reading that book and saying, like, if you can show us one thing where you're not really conditioning the one with the other, like, I'll buy you a vacation in a wonderful island, a tropical island for the next four weeks. I'm pretty sure you can't convince us that there is a case where this is not actually happening. Where you're not really. If you look carefully, you see how if you define an ownable that you own the bike and therefore you are able to learn how to cycle. Right. Or therefore you cannot cycle. Right. So you can decide what you're doing. This, this relationship. If you. That's it's not. It's always like this. And that we can overlook something so simple in our modern world that we can overlook that and do as if inequality is not caused by fragmenting one from the other. I find an amazing historical development. Really amazing. Because in the end, if you really real realize that I think I'm. I look back and I think like, how could I ever have believed that like defining different kinds of knowledges will get us out of this trap. Right? Will get us like make it the word more equal. How. How did I ever believe that? And that, that I hope people really take from the book when they read it. That they have power to influence that.
- [33:39]
D
Absolutely. And I think, I mean it really resonates with me your comment that it's important for us to all recognize the power we have as knowledge workers in the way we identify these things or not. I think we see that a lot in the spaces I am usually in, in libraries and archives. And sometimes we think that there's no ownership and so we don't label it. But that leaves space for other, other folks to, to take that ownership, to take that power to create these inequalities. And I think you laid out a lot for like examining those, those scenarios that I found really helpful.
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B
Yeah, thank you. And I think there is also this whole question, right. I'm in. I'm, I'm. I'm working in a like science based Institution. So the Max Planck Society mainly consists of people who are scientists who do cutting edge research. And then we're having these debates on open data and open sciences. And you realize how difficult is to make clear to people that openness at the same time conditions that some people get not rewarded for what they know. Right. It's an inequality instrument. And I hope that if people read that, then they realize what they are actually doing.
- [34:57]
D
Right. And we can have more nuanced ways for talking about things and recognizing everyone who's connected to different kinds of knowledge. Yeah. Well, I've taken a lot of your time, but before we wrap up, I would love if you could each share what you're working on next. If you have other projects that come out of this book or anything completely new you're working on now that maybe you have time. This book is wrapped up. Annapurna, do you want to start?
- [35:27]
C
Yeah. So we've already done. So we've been working on this book for a really long time. And in the sense that to, to. To get across what we really wanted to say, Dagmar made me rewrite stuff like 9, 10 times and then rewrote it herself. She said, don't mess with my golden words and go back to the version and see something completely different. And this is what happened. And. But it was very enjoyable and I think. So following that, we. We had a conference last May in, in Berlin for two weeks where we brought. Where Dagmar basically helped us organize a conference where handloom weavers from India and potters from. From Brazil and gardeners and linguists from Papua New guinea came along with scholars. And there was a conversation. We were able to kind of find a kind of an intermediate language through following each other's practices. So there was a spinning workshop and there was a cooking workshop. And so we slowly managed to start talking to each other. So I think that what this gives is, is that it allows us to take a step back from what feels like a very overwhelming, you know, dominant idea of knowledge ownership with science and law. And what I particularly like about our book is that it's clearly a problem even for those people within science and law. This is not a problem only for those people who are operating outside. So while I might be using it more in that space, what is really exciting is that there isn't that kind of thing, that, okay, this works for science and law, but it doesn't work for you other guys. But that's fine. It's not like that. It's really a problem for Everybody.
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D
Yeah. And that, I think, gives more of a common ground for working together. Marius, anything new on your plate that you're looking forward to working on next now?
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E
Well, yes, since a year I started ERC projects at the University of Oslo, which is called Before Copyright, and it studies the history of printing privileges in early modern Europe. So these were exclusive rights for the production of books, engravings, maps and such like. And this project, well, it relates very much to the book. It studies the way in which these rights impacted the type of knowledge that was put into circulation. So we're looking team of about six people at the state actors who were involved, who got the rights, who did not get the rights for what type of things that they could, what did they not get the rights, etc. And also what is the importance of all this for the status of the author? Because eventually that is how we nowadays define copyright is through the function of the author. But what happened before that and what were the alternative pathways also that could have been taken, but were so far perhaps not studied? So that's the project I'm busy with now. We started last year and still four more years to go, so that's probably what I'll be doing for the next period of time.
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D
Yeah, sounds like you'll be busy. Dagmar, do you want to share with us what you're working on now?
- [39:01]
B
Yeah, I make it very short, actually, with Annapurna together we've started a project of getting other people involved into this idea of knowable and ownable. So to bring it to NGOs to discuss it with legal specialists or with people who do innovation studies. So that project will have a follow up and I hope we can also think more about, like, what are other communities of other ways of thinking about the nonable and ownable that you can think about in the future. And on the side, I'm trying for a long time already to finish a book on comparison in history and how you probably have to rethink the narrativity of the 19th century and what it would mean to do an asynchronous comparison in history. That's the next book project I'm having. It's developing slowly.
- [39:58]
D
Sounds like a great project. Well, thank you all so much for chatting today. Once again, I've been speaking with the editors of Ownership of Knowledge Beyond Intellectual Property, published by MIT Press. My name is Jen Hoyer and you're listening to New Books Network.