Abstract

Dr Christopher May. Commodifying the « Information Age » : Intellectual Property Rights, the State and the Internet Information and communication technologies are seen as one of the key catalysts of the compression of space and time which globalisation has heralded. However, only the reification of the market makes plausible an argument for a significant decline in the efficacy of the state, or the claim that we have entered some new phase of global economic organisation. Reifying the market obscures the underlying supports on which information age capitalism continues to rest, most importantly the continuing centrality of commodification for capitalism’s global reproduction. In this article I examine the commodification of the « new economy » which has emerged across the Internet. Drawing on Marx work on the role of law in capitalism I stress that the centrality of intellectual property rights to the « new economy ». This suggests we need to recognise the continuing processes of capitalist commodification, not celebrate a new epoch of economic organisation