[Urbanstudy] On Lewis Hyde, author of 'The Gift' meets Santos' subaltern cosmopolitan legality

[solomon benjamin]

Dear Lawrence and Friends, 
Thought this article in the NYT mag. on Lewis Hyde author of 'The Gift' would be of wider interest! (Lawrence, thanks for the book, now being avidly re-read!). 
Check out:
What Is Art For?
By DANIEL B. SMITH
Published: November 14, 2008 at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/magazine/16hyde-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

'.. After the lecture, as we walked across the darkened campus, I mentioned to Hyde that I had found Lessig’s talk to be logical and well crafted.
“A little too well crafted, if you ask me,” Hyde said.
This took me by surprise — Hyde is a polite man who rarely speaks critically of others — and I later asked him to elaborate. “Look, Lessig is a lawyer,” he said. “I like him, I think he’s solid. But it’s a very particular way of thinking.” Hyde himself makes use of the Creative Commons, yet there’s a formality to the setup that troubles him. “All of the C.C. licenses use the lever of the law,” he said. “They have the assumption of private ownership behind them. So Lessig, in a certain sense, is confining himself to one slice of this stuff, which is not as capacious as a true commons would be.” 

Would this pose two intersects towards 'an urban revolution'? 1) First, in mostly small firm based industrial production that customize commodity lines via an intensive copy culture that spurs innovation that includes reverse engineering. The IPR centered 'creative class' arguments fall flat! 
2) Second, in their transnational urbanization: Wider connections to a commons (seen in Hyde's perspective) via  small trade trans-national networks that connect Chennai, Bangalore and Yiwu in Eastern China. Opened up via such 'porous legalities', into what Santos et al term 'Subaltern cosmopolitan legality' (Santos de Sousa & Rodriguez's Law and Globalization from below). 

If situations destabilize those 'in power' and associated 'property', than perhaps something goes on. Perhaps the parallel to Disney would be Daniel Chow from the Ohio Univ. law dept.  Hired by Procter and Gamble, Chow investigated piracy and argues for it's link to 'global terrorism'. This link is familiar story. See his statement to the US senate at:n 
http://www.cecc.gov/pages/roundtables/051605/Chow.php  

Whats perhaps more fascinating is his argument on why a crackdown on piracy is made difficult via it's urbanization -- perhaps another revolution? 
See:
http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/faculty/digest.php?digestID=57

And for a fascinating view of a commons city, in all it's unsettling fluidity, that seems straight out of my own memories of 1990's East Delhi, see:
Chinese instant cities http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/06/instant-cities/hessler-text

Cheers
Solly


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