The Deconstruction of Authorship, Copyright and Entrepreneurship

On November 10, 2018, Martin Fredriksson has published an article entitled “Authors, Inventors and Entrepreneurs: Intellectual Property and Actors of Extraction” in Open Cultural Studies.
A Blog Post by Pablo Markin.
In his article, Martin Fredriksson has sought to deconstruct the notion of the “author as a cultural and ideological persona that underpins the privatisation of immaterial resources” (319), in order to understand the “construction and function of the entrepreneur in extractive capitalism” (319). Therefore, this researcher has adopted “a synthetic approach in the sense that it relies on an overview and critical analysis of a wide range of existing research on the formation of appropriative authorship—mostly in copyright but also in patent law” (320).
In this paper, Fredriksson argues that “[c]ertain power dynamics were thus inscribed in the construction of the modern author from the outset as the autonomous creator became the protagonist in the world of arts and letters” (324). This allows this author to critique the “vision of the entrepreneur as an avant-gardist who challenges existing structures, and established practices and drives the creative destruction necessary for economic progress, is still common in contemporary management discourses” (326).
Based on his intertextual research, Fredriksson shows how “the information economy subjects an ever-wider range of resources to the forces of commodification” (328). According to this perspective, “history and politics of intellectual property rights provide concrete examples of how […] dispossession and expropriation can be enacted in relation to cultural works and traditional knowledge” (327-328).
By Pablo Markin
Featured Image Credits: Exquisite Corpse Workshop at Arts & Science Festival, UK, March 15, 2016 | © Courtesy of Antonio Roberts/Flickr.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Pablo Markin (March 5, 2019). The Deconstruction of Authorship, Copyright and Entrepreneurship. Open Culture. Retrieved April 20, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/shr4