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The South Atlantic Quarterly 100.4 (2001) 919-947



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Culture Wars on the Net:
Intellectual Property and Corporate Propriety in Digital Environments

Rosemary J. Coombe and Andrew Herman


What's in a name? If it is a brand name, potentially millions. Trademarks are intangible assets of immense value that magically bind consumers' devotion—brand loyalty no less—with corporate personality through the force of the legal category of goodwill. Through its trademarks, the corporation synecdochically manifests a persona. Managing the corporate persona is serious business, especially in postmodern conditions where maintaining distinction in competitive markets involves huge investments in the symbolism and imagery that will keep corporate connotations on the cutting edge of "brand recognition." Digital environments, however, enable practices that promise to transform the nature of corporate-consumer relations. These practices undermine the traditional capacities of companies to control their images and manage their imagery while creating conditions for consumers to challenge the very forms of commodity fetishism (erasures of both conditions of production and the conditions under which symbolic value is produced) on which the corporate persona as an asset has for so long relied.

Our own ethnographic studies of contemporary [End Page 919] consumer cultural practices demonstrate that these are always in a dialogical relationship with legal power and its popular interpretation. 1 Although it was developed in analog environments, we have found the thesis more pertinent still in digital contexts. In The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties, Rosemary Coombe considers mass media signifiers and popular cultural readings of corporately controlled commodity-signs—billboard advertisements and brand names, logos, cartoon characters, and celebrity images—that circulate as part of our public culture but are also private properties, protected by laws of intellectual property. 2 Intellectual property laws give exclusive rights to owners to control the circulation of texts and to enjoin their uses by others, to levy royalties, and to threaten lawsuits when these symbols are reproduced in subaltern cultural activities. These laws confer on corporations an enormous amount of cultural power while they simultaneously shape tactics of subaltern appropriation and recoding. In The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory, Andrew Herman argues that the symbolic processes of corporate branding of, and in, cyberspace territorializes the Web as a striated space of corporate sovereignty and consumer desire. 3 The "friction-free capitalism" of Bill Gates's utopian understanding of the so-called new economy is a highly regulated and disciplined space for the performance of both corporate and consumer identities. 4

Digital environments clearly provide new opportunities for corporations to put their intellectual properties into circulation and to surround these with new fields of connotation. The Internet is fueled by advertising revenue, and logos are ubiquitous. Indeed, digital technology creates new means and media for corporations to insinuate their advertising images. This new form of corporate cultural power, however, is met with new forms of consumer resistance. The World Wide Web (the Web) gives members of the digitally connected public new capacities to evade their subject positions as mere consumers of corporate imagery by providing technological means and social and cultural conditions for consumers to take the commodity signs of mass culture and transform these into popular culture and to create a popular legal culture in the process.

By mass culture we mean mass-produced texts, images, and sounds—cultural artifacts circulated to a mass of consumers by centrally controlled media industries. Such a culture is unidirectional, or in Bakhtinian terms, monologic—it speaks from a singular place with a singular voice—and it [End Page 920] does not let you talk back, or if you do, your voice is unlikely to be widely heard. You might strategically alter billboards with graffiti, as Ron English, the Guerrilla Girls, and the Billboard Liberation Front do. 5 You might create art that uses and transforms advertising imagery as artists such as Ashley Bickerton, Hans Haacke, Mike Bidlo, and Barbara Kruger do. You might, like artist Paul Hanson, create "Barbie art" by taking the dolls and turning...

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