The Implications of Intellectual Property and Copyright for Identity Politics

Reading Boyle and Barlow, I couldn't help but think of Charles Stross, one of the most interesting and radical of the new generation of cyberpunk writers (a term that doesn't really fit the work but which I use here because Stross's fiction is partly influenced by the work of writers William Gibson and Vernor Vinge as well as singularity theorists like Ray Kurzweil and in fact shares some of their stylistic and thematic interests, but mostly because it communicates the exciting sense of radical newness of contemporary sci-fi as exemplified by Stross and others such as Richard K. Morgan, Alastair Reynolds, and Chris Moriarty). Reading this week's articles, I am especially reminded of Stross's best known work, the novel Accelerando, published in 2005 as the final iteration of a famous series of stories originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction between 2001 and 2004.

Obviously it's Boyle's reference to cyberpunk that made me think of this, because Stross uses the situations of the novel to carry the implied ethical problems of copyright and intellectual property specifically as they apply to human identity politics to their logical extreme. Check out the following passages from the book to see what I mean (by the way, if you want to read the whole novel, you might be interested in knowing that Stross has made it available in a number of electronic formats -- go to www.accelerando.org and scroll down a little):

"Let me get this straight. You're uploads--nervous system state vectors--from spiny lobsters? The Moravec operation; take a neuron, map its synapses, replace with microelectrodes that deliver identical outputs from a simulation of the nerve. Repeat for entire brain, until you've got a working map of it in your simulator. That right?"

"Da. Is-am assimilate expert system--use for self-awareness and contact with net at large--then hack into Moscow Windows NT User Group website. Am wanting to defect. Must repeat? Okay?"

Manfred winces. He feels sorry for the lobsters.... Awakening to consciousness in a human-dominated Internet, that must be terribly confusing! There are no points of reference in their ancestry, no biblical certainties in the new millennium that, stretching ahead, promises as much change as has happened since their Precambrian origin....

The lobsters are not the sleek, strongly superhuman intelligences of pre-singularity mythology: They're a dim-witted collective of huddling crustaceans. Before their discarnation, before they were uploaded one neuron at a time and injected into cyberspace, they swallowed their food whole, then chewed it in a chitin-lined stomach....

"Can you help us?" ask the lobsters.

"Let me think about it," says Manfred. He closes the dialogue window, opens his eyes again, and shakes his head. Someday he, too, is going to be a lobster, swimming around and waving his pincers in a cyberspace so confusingly elaborate that his uploaded identity is cryptozoic: a living fossil from the depths of geological time, when mass was dumb and space was unstructured.

This is just to introduce the concept of digital brain mapping and personality/memory upload that is central to the novel (as well as many others both by Stross and others). In a later scene, as the potential subjects of digital personality upload are discussed, so too are the legal and ethical implications of digitizing more complex organisms:

"The lobsters are sentient," Manfred persists. "What about those poor kittens? Don't they deserve minimal rights? How about you? .... The kittens are probably not going to be allowed to run. They're too fucking dangerous--they grow up into cats, solitary and highly efficient killing machines. With intelligence and no socialization they'll be too dangerous to have around. They're prisoners, Pam, raised to sentience only to discover they're under a permanent death sentence. How fair is that?"

"But they're only uploads." Pamela stares at him. "Software, right? You could reinstantiate them on another hardware platform, like, say, your Aineko [a robotic pet cat]. So the argument about killing them doesn't really apply, does it?"

"So? We're going to be uploading humans in a couple of years. I think we need to take a rain check on the utilitarian philosophy before it bites us on the cerebral cortex. Lobsters, kittens, humans--it's a slippery slope...."

[Another character, Bob Franklin, interjects at this point:]

"But they're just software! Software based on fucking lobsters, for God's sake! I'm not even sure they are sentient--I mean, they're, what, a ten-million-neuron network hooked up to a syntax engine and a crappy knowledge base? What kind of basis for intelligence is that?"

Manfred's finger jabs out. "That's what they'll say about you, Bob. Do it. Do it or don't even think about uploading out of meatspace when your body packs in, because your life won't be worth living. The precedent you set here determines how things are done tomorrow.... Some kinds of intellectual land grab just shouldn't be allowed."

"Lobsters--" Franklin shakes his head. "Lobsters, cats. You're serious, aren't you? You think they should be treated as human-equivalent?"

"It's not so much that they should be treated as human-equivalent, as that if they aren't treated as people, it's quite possible that other uploaded beings won't be treated as people either...."

It's worth mentioning that the future being imagined here is not decades or centuries from now, but years. Now I'm not necessarily suggesting that we should take this as an immediately cautionary tale (though there are some out there who would)--what I'm interested in is the connection to Boyle. The future Stross imagines here foregrounds the issues Boyle addresses in his article, particularly the increasingly difficult problem of defining the concept of "information" itself in a culture where information is a highly valuable commodity. As Boyle makes clear, it seems our conceptions both of what constitutes information and of how information is to be legally handled become highly problematic when we are unable to differentiate anymore between electronic and genetic information--it's all just code. For Stross, the inevitable end-point of this revolution (which theorists like Kurzweil posit is coming) is that human identity itself becomes more information. The ethical and legal implications are both obvious and frightening. I don't have any answers or even, really, any insights, but it sure is fun to think about, particularly since these ideas have become so central to contemporary sci-fi, from Accelerando to the Sci-Fi Channel's reinvention of Battlestar Galactica (which reimagines the robotic Cylons of the hokey '70s show as fanatically monotheistic cybernetic clones with the ability to upload and download their consciousnesses, personalities, and memories into newly engineered biomechanical bodies).

Oh, and try assigning Accelerando as a reading in a freshman composition class. You'll have all sorts of fun watching your students' heads explode.