1. What links do you see between the struggles happening in different sectors around patents, copyrights and other forms of monopoly rights over information? (Answers can focus on a couple sectors that the panelist knows best)
While the details can get very complicated, it all comes down to the same question: who owns information? And since when is information something you can own? The consolidation of a strict, and strictly enforceable, 'intellectual property' regime is the dream of a new kind of class. I call them the vectoralist class. They are no longer so interested in owning land or capital. The actual production of primary and secondary goods can be contracted out. Rather, the vectoralist class imagines it can control the production and distribution process through the ownership of a portfolio of patents, copyrights, brands and 'trade secrets', protected under international law.
From this perspective, movements that challenge this consolidation of intellectual property as the new basis of class domination all have something in common, even if they don't know it. The so-called 'piracy' of media products, in both the underdeveloped world and the overdeveloped world, is a social movement in all but name. It is people reclaiming their collective culture back from the culture industries. This is the same struggle as the that around free software, and around the patenting of genes and around the ownership of seed stocks. These are all movements that intuit the fact that culture, knowledge, science are all things are collectively produced. Private ownership is an artifice imposed on collaborative and creative work. And which inevitably excludes someone. The history of popular movement is the history of the dispossession of 'folk' artists and the creation of private proeprty owners in copyrights -- its the seed from which sprang today's media conglomerates.
2. What are your views on a convergence of these movements? (Answers can provide perspectives on what the convergence of certain movements might take or mean and strategy ideas, perhaps zooming in on certain countries/regions as examples)
The various movements for an information commons overlap. They all grasp part of the big picture. It's not that everyone working on the ownership of genes should run 'open source' software, and so on. It's about tactical alliances, and collaborations in seeking understanding of how information became something that could be subjected to something approaching an absolute private property regime.