Liza's Bucket: Intellectual Property and the Metamodern Impulse

Abstract

Intellectual property rights are a critical part of our response to rapid technological change, shifting commodity frontiers and ecological degradation. However, in order to respond adequately to the world as it is, we must move away from privileging individual initiative, property and extrinsic reward as the premise of these rights, towards a more humanistic version of why and how we create and experience them. A starting point is the recognition, articulated here for the first time, that intellectual property rights are psychoactive in their effect on creators and users. Using the metaphor of a broken bucket to explain the flawed design and relationship-engendering nature of these property rights, the paper sketches the normative contours of a metamodern revival of intellectual property law.

Keywords: Intellectual property rights, Public domain, Incentive, Property, Metamodernism