Title
Digital Enclosure: The Privatization of Standards and Standardization
Author
Timothy Schoechle
Date
1/01/2005
(Original Publish Date: 10/24/2003)
(Original Publish Date: 10/24/2003)
Abstract
The concept of property rights and notions of public and private are social constructions with a long history. In western society, the term "enclosure" dates from 16th century Britain, where the Enclosure Movement was used to describe the political economic process of the privatization of "pubic" or "common" land. This term has been recently appropriated in legal discourse as the 2nd Enclosure Movement to describe the increasing privatization of knowledge and information as "intellectual" property in a new electronic information environment. This paper further applies this notion of Digital Enclosure—enclosure in the digital age—to a particular form of knowledge that has an inherently quasi-public nature, technical standards and the standardization process.
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