Whelan on a Dispositive Analysis of Google and Copyright

Glen Whelan, Copenhagen Business School, is publishing Born Political: A Dispositive Analysis of Google and Copyright in Governance of Digital Technology, Big Data and the Internet, a special issues of Business & Society. Here is the abstract.

Google is a complex and complicated political beast with a significant, and often confusing, interest, in copyright matters. On the one hand, for example, Google is widely accused of profiting from piracy. On the other, Google routinely complies with what is rapidly approaching a billion copyright takedown requests annually. In the present article, Foucault, neo-Gramscians, and Deleuze and Guattari, are utilized to help construct a 3² dispositive analysis framework that overlaps three dispositive modalities (law, ethical, utilitarian) and perspectives (apparatus, articulation, assemblage). In applying the framework to the Google-copyright relationship, the article shows how Google was ‘born political’: in that it was, and still is, disposed, by an apparatus comprised of copyright laws, Silicon Valley culture, and broad advances in digitization. Moreover, the article shows how Google continuously acts where ‘politics is born’: as it significantly shapes copyright considerations by disposing of (non-)human and organizational phenomena through articulations and assemblages.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.