Subjects and objects of knowledge: The production of academic intellectual property

This dissertation investigates the social production of academic intellectual property---how it is formed and deployed, where, with what consequences, for whom---and the border skirmishes attendant upon that productive process. In particular, the study attempts to assess the stakes, for the law and the academy, of using intellectual property (IP) law to define and defend academic work. I begin by tracing the historical emergence of both IP law and the modern research university. This historical analysis suggests that intellectual property is defined in contradistinction to a conceptual space---namely, the public domain---largely, though not exclusively, governed in the U.S. by the university. Drawing on legal, historical, and qualitative research, in subsequent chapters I explore the public and private controversies and negotiations that shape the articulation of academic intellectual property and the operation of boundary objects to manage the destabilizing effects of that articulation. A comparison of the contradictory rhetorics of authorship deployed to resolve a 1989 copyright infringement case to those advanced by academic collaborators in interviews indicates some of the problems of translation that arise when paradigms designed to promote the circulation of commodities are brought into conversation with paradigms designed to promote the exchange of gifts. Similar problems of translation are delineated in an examination of the legal history of professorial copyright and the implications of that history for contemporary debates over the ownership of lecture materials. This analysis of problems of authorship is complemented by an exploration of the production of boundary objects to mediate but maintain difference across the multiple social worlds involved in the propertization of academic research for technology transfer. I conclude with a consideration of efforts to reconceptualize scientific facts as trade secrets, and the implications of these endeavors for one of the central dynamics identified in this study: the elision of freedom of inquiry with freedom of property. As in other arenas, I argue, property rights discourse offers to preserve and protect a "balance" between property and the commons even as the invocation of that discourse assists in a fundamental reconfiguration of that balance.