Cloning computers: From rights of possession to rights of creation

Questions of originality and about the border between nature and artifice are linked to the practices of international property rights and lie in the contact zone between the West and its others. The notion of intellectual property is strongly connected with standard epistemological assumptions, especially those pertaining to the existence of natural stable borders and instant discoveries. The notion of natural stable borders allows for the existence of pure, i.e. completely defined or unproblematic objects or things. The concept of discovery suggests the detachment of a relative instant of time as the definite moment of recognition or creation of a thing (a stable form). The epistemological assumptions around notions of stable borders and discovery are associated with the idea of the ‘primacy of the origin’, which invokes the precedence, priority, predominance, preference, prerogative, privilege, right-of-way, seniority, supremacy of the original over the copy, of the model over the imitated. Primacy of the origin is mobilized to legitimate granting intellectual property rights to those who ‘first’ recognize or invent a thing. Accordingly, by invoking institutionalized intellectual property rights, agents can side-step claims of liberty or rights of creation through naturalized or invisible processes of domination. However, during the second half of the twentieth century, strong philosophical movements, especially within French philosophy exemplified by the work of Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, and Derrida, have assembled powerful tools of deconstruction which challenge the primacy of notions of origin. Also, in the last decades, a stream of STS (science, technology, and society studies) scholars working in theWest, such as Madeleine Akrich, Geoffrey Bowker, Michel Callon, Donna Haraway, Sheila Jasanoff, Bruno Latour, John Law, Donald MacKenzie, Emily Martin, Annemarie Mol, Arie Rip, Susan Leigh Star, Marilyn Strathern, Lucy Suchman, Sharon Traweek, and Helen Verran, among others, have been translating, adapting and using philosophical tools linked to these philosophical movements to show just how problematic borders and origins can be in Science as Culture Vol. 14, No. 2, 139–160, June 2005