Paper short abstract:

With reference to fieldwork on experimental digital music scenes in Britain, and following Humphrey and Verdery (2004), I address how intellectual property norms are reconceptualized in novel practices across a spate of genres, noting the diverse ontological politics that they entail.

Paper long abstract:

One aim of this panel is to blast open the discussion of digital music's creation, circulation and consumption beyond the normative assumptions of the 'piracy' paradigm. Generative here is the anthropological perspective on intellectual and cultural property given by Caroline Humphrey and Katherine Verdery's Introduction to Property in Question (2004) in which they urge anthropologists to deconstruct the ontological categories enshrined in law that underpin property relations: notions of rights, the nature of 'person' and 'thing' or of the subject and object of property rights 'inherent in a view of property as relations among persons by means of, or with respect to, things', and even the 'relations' that pertain (6). In this paper I follow the lead given by Humphrey and Verdery with reference to current fieldwork on heterogeneous digital music scenes in Britain, addressing how intellectual property norms are being reconceptualized and reimagined in novel practices scattered across a spate of new genres. Palpable in these practices, but marked and conscious to varying degrees, are a range of ontological politics (Law, Mol, Verran) enacted with respect to the aforementioned terms. I first note the radical diversity of forms of author-'subject', musical 'object' (or practice, event or site) and relations between them evident today, relating these to institutional conditions. I then argue that the (ontological) politics immanent in some of them in can only be grasped through an analysis of the contested genealogies envisaged by practitioners: a performative politics that both produces history and intervenes in it.