정보의 자본화 과정 비판 – 정보의 추상화•사유화•상품화, 지적 재산권

This paper takes informational capitalism as a concept to analyze contemporary capitalism, and aims to examine and criticize the process of capitalization of information as an accumulation mode of informational capital. The concept, informational capitalism indicates a new accumulation mode of capital under the double process of both informatization of capital and capitalization of information, with the medium of informational technology, commodity, and culture. In capitalization of information in particular, there are four processes: abstraction, privatization, and commodification of information, and Intellectual property. Abstraction of information is that it becomes semiotic entity or signal detached from material realities, while it is accompanied with dematerialization, quantification, fetishization of information. Privatization of information is an establishment of exclusive ownership of information commons, especially through the ideology of individual authorship which explicitly designate the particular owner while it excludes workers who actually produce informational goods. Commodification of information is to create artificial scarcity for non-rival information, to render exchange value on it, and to apply wage labor and market relation to it. And Intellectual property is the legal system for nation state to secure and protect the monopoly of information as above, through which a diversity of individual rights of ownership to the collectively created informational content are differentiated, and ways of ownership, sale, and usage are controlled. This critical examination of capitalization of information has its significance as a conceptual framework to further investigate and reflect rarely studied information labor and information culture as well as information society in terms of informational capitalism.