The speaker at the next Informatics Seminar (12/1/2006 3:00pm ICS2 136) will be Mark Poster, from the UCI Department of History (and Informatics). From Digital to Analogue: Copyright and Peer-to-Peer File-sharing My theoretical standpoint frames the question of copyright in the context of a new relation of humans and machines, and this in a global context. I argue that digital culture involves changes in the binaries of modernity that are due to the new relations of humans to information machines – subject/object; producer/consumer; time/space; etc. As a result there are changes to epistemology – the new epistemology is no longer one of a relation of the individual subject to truth but one of assemblages of humachines and knowledges.

Media become central to the question of truth – as always – print gives you modern subject; film gives you imagination as surface; TV gives you passive consumer; global, digital networks give you truth as a function of care of self, of the process of self-transformation implicated in the relation to information machines. Instead of fixed identity as presumption and/or goal of the self, whether that fixity be the modernist notion of reason or the traditionalist notion of the past, the self becomes a fluid, non-territorial process of transformation.

Peer-to-peer practices and software are central to the new relation of humans to information machines and require a politics that seriously revises or eliminates copyright law. At stake is a new culture, a new configuration of the self, and this is at the level of the global.