{"id":3739,"date":"2007-11-11T13:04:57","date_gmt":"2007-11-11T20:04:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/2007\/11\/11\/katyals-semiotic-disobedience\/"},"modified":"2007-11-11T22:57:33","modified_gmt":"2007-11-12T05:57:33","slug":"katyals-semiotic-disobedience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/2007\/11\/11\/katyals-semiotic-disobedience\/","title":{"rendered":"Katyal’s “Semiotic Disobedience”"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you haven’t already read Sonia Katyal’s “Privacy v. Piracy”<\/a> and “The New Surveillance,”<\/a> you should. The articles have proven quite prescient — with the Sony DRM rootkit and AT&T’s announcement<\/a> about forthcoming ISP-level filtering, the notion of “piracy surveillance” has become increasingly relevant.<\/p>\n

She recently sent me a new article, “Semiotic Disobedience,<\/a>” which she’d appreciate feedback on. <\/p>\n

“In this Article, I seek to introduce another framework to supplement
\nFiske’s important metaphor: the phenomenon of “semiotic
\ndisobedience.”Three contemporary cultural moments in the world – one
\ncorporate, one academic, and one artistic – call for a new understanding
\nof the limitations and possibilities of semiotic democracy and underline
\nthe need for a supplementary framework. As public spaces have become
\nconverted into vehicles for corporate advertising – ads painted onto
\nsidewalks and into buildings, schools, and other public spaces – product
\nplacement has soared to new heights of power and subtlety. And
\nthroughout, the law has generously offered near-sovereign protection to
\nsuch symbolism through the ever-expanding vehicle of intellectual
\nproperty protection. Equations between real property and intellectual
\nproperty are ubiquitous. Underlying these themes is a powerful linkage
\nbetween intellectual and tangible property: as one expands, so does the
\nother….
\n“Just as previous discussions of civil disobedience focused on the need
\nto challenge existing laws by using certain types of public and private
\nproperty for expressive freedoms, today’s generation seeks to alter
\nexisting intellectual property by interrupting, appropriating, and then
\nreplacing the passage of information from creator to consumer. This
\nArticle suggests that the phenomenon of semiotic disobedience offers a
\nradically different vantage point than Fiske’s original vision, one that
\nunderlines the importance of distributive justice in intellectual
\nproperty. Thus, instead of interrogating the limits of First Amendment
\nfreedoms, as many scholars have already done, I argue that a study of
\nsemiotic disobedience reveals an even greater need to study both the
\ncore boundaries between types of properties – intellectual, real,
\npersonal – and how propertization offers a subsidy to particular types
\nof expression over others.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you haven’t already read Sonia Katyal’s “Privacy v. Piracy” and “The New Surveillance,” you should. The articles have proven quite prescient — with the Sony DRM rootkit and AT&T’s announcement about forthcoming ISP-level filtering, the notion of “piracy surveillance” has become increasingly relevant. She recently sent me a new article, “Semiotic Disobedience,” which she’d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":72,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/72"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3739\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cmusings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}