A. The Birth of Knowledge Economy

To discuss copyright from a world perspective depicting the world as a gigantic space and dividing it into the First, Second, and Third world; into the countries which reside in the Center on the one hand, and those which live in the Periphery on the other hand, or if I expand it further—the world which has divided into “cultural products producers” and “cultural products consumers”, the topic of the discussion is heading in the direction of inequalities in knowledge.

I begin this essay by travelling to the past, to the time when intellectual products have started to earn their reputations as highly potential commercial goods and when the employment of copyright concept has slowly led more towards its use to secure, strengthen, and protect the powerful position of main producers of intellectual products.

By “cultural products producers” I mean countries that grouped into “traditional elite group”—a concept that is used by Geller (1994) and quoted from Innis (1972)—to refer to those inherited the tradition of literature works publication, the production of modern art and other knowledge products from their long history of modern education. This elite group then transforms its old tradition and production capacity into the cultural capital, an act which confers its members the power to rule over other countries and placed the latter to be “consumer of cultural products”.

Enlightenment has played an important role in supporting the making of intellectual products as a cornucopia of highly important and useful things for both local and international contexts since the eighteenth century (Geller 1994: 162-163). Moving onwards, the civilization has entered the stage where “knowledge” has strongly attached to an adjective word “economy”. The age of “new knowledge economy” has officially started where things are not perceived merely for their knowledge value, but for the possibility to make a huge profit from them.

Among the producers of cultural products in Europe prior the twentieth century, the importance of economical value of those products was initially built on the foundation of  the language sameness which boosted the popularity of particular literature works in particular countries: French-language books from France gained the reputations in Belgium, German-language materials from Germany read by Dutch people, English-language books from England had their considerable success in the U.S. Such prominence has made the countries mentioned above well aware that  it was in the nature of every cultural product to seek its wider audience (Saunders 1992: 167-185).

Innis (1972) illustrates the increasing economical value of knowledge by giving an example from the fifteenth century. The end of fifteenth century was marked by the increasing demand for reproductions of manuscripts for church, law, medicine, and trade. The manuscripts were produced in various languages: Latin, Greek, German, and English. The demand was followed by the development of an international trade system and book publishing company (Innis 1972: 143).

The new knowledge economy has shown its increasing value when the exploration of the new world and the colonialism practice have led not only to the discovery of new areas but also new markets. As the power of the cultural products grows higher, the logical response coming from this new situation is the desire to control the flow. The relationship between power—including the desire to maintain it—and knowledge has been the major topic of several scholarly works most notably Innis (1972) and Hardt and Negri (2000).

Following the classic works of Bell (1973) and Castells (1996) acknowledging the important position of knowledge in the development of society, Bryson et al (2000) emphasize such position in contemporary society—of which according to Castells are heading to “informational capitalism society”—and assert that economical power does not entirely depend on material resources, but on new ways of processing knowledge:

The economic competitiveness is now bound up not with new materials per se but with new ways of producing, using and combining diverse knowledge; the same ingredients, in essence, can be arranged in new and better recipes (Bryson et al 2000 : 1).

In short, the possession of knowledge and information will put a country in a strong position and win the competition with other countries. In this thesis, I use “knowledge” and “cultural product” interchangeably. I try to explain the close relationship between these two terms using Castell’s explanation on the structure of a society. According to Castells (1996), the human relationship in a society is structured by historically relationship of  “production”, “experience”, and “power”.

Production is the action of humankind on matter (nature) to appropriate it and transform it for its benefit by obtaining a product, consuming (unevenly) part of it, and accumulating surplus for investment, according to a variety of socially determined goals. Experience is the action of human subjects on themselves, determined by the interaction between their biological and cultural identities, and in relationship to their social and natural environment. Power is the relationship between human subjects which, on the basis of production and experience, imposes the will of some subjects upon others by the potential or actual use of violence, physical or symbolic (Castells 1996: 15).

Castells argues that the interrelationship between “production”, “experience” and “power” communicates symbolic matters. It is the symbolic matters produced and transformed into valuable ones. The same symbolic matters are also crystallization of stories of society and its environment over a span of particular history. They, Castells asserts, “generate cultures and collective identities” (Castells 1996: 15). In other words, a society produces and distributes  “cultural products” which will be consumed by other society as “knowledge”. Knowledge manifests in various kinds of cultural products.

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