[oil21] Saturday & Sunday at WfK: Taxonomies of Intellectual Property. A workshop with Kobe Matthys and guests

[The Oil of the 21st Century]

Wiederaufbau für Kreditanstalt
Mauerstraße 68, Ecke Leipziger
U2 Mohrenstraße, U6 Stadtmitte



Taxonomies of Intellectual Property
A List of Quasi Things

A workshop about the development of a mapping tool for a list of
quasi things. Kobe Matthys of Agency invites Peggy Pierrot and
Philippe Rivière.

Saturday, December 8, 2007, 3 pm - 8 pm: Workshop
Saturday, December 8, 2007, 9 pm - late: Bar
Sunday, December 9, 2007, 3 pm - 8 pm: Workshop



The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is an agency
which was founded by the United Nations in 1974. Its
headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland. WIPO's principal tasks
is to develop an international intellectual property
classification system. It cooperates with the World Trade
Organization (WTO) for the implementation of the TRIPS (Trade
related aspects of intellectual property) of the GATT agreement
of 1994. TRIPS imposes intellectual property law worldwide. The
main characteristics of this agreement on intellectual property
is that it is based on private rights, it demands from
intellectual property to generate profits and its system is
developed for the international trade of transnational
corporations. The standard of WIPO's international intellectual
property system means a treat to the diversity of practices.

Agency is an agency which was founded by Kobe Matthys in 1992.
Its post box is in Brussels, Belgium. Agency constitutes a list
of quasi things. Quasi-things fall just inside or outside a
category, they move from one category to another or they don't
belong to any category at all. Quasi things witness hesitation
in terms of classification. The list of quasi things includes a
diversity of examples of things that are excluded from the
current international intellectual property classification
system. For the purpose of evaluating intellectual property, the
law employs the division between categories such as nature and
culture, evolution and creation, object and subject, collective
versus individual... Many things are difficult to classify as
such. For example specimen 809 in the list is related to a
performance called "Sawing a lady in half" by the illusionist
Horace Goldin. Horace Goldin tried to use intellectual property
law (copyright, patent law, and trade secret law) as a way to
protect the secrets of this illusion. But intellectual property
law fails to protect the practice of magic.

This workshop will deal with questions of classification systems
and taxonomies of intellectual property, as well as discuss, in
the context of other archive projects, the development of a
website for agency's list of quasi things. At this moment, the
website is under construction at the URL: www.agentive.org. The
programming of this website in collaboration with Peggy Pierrot
started from the alteration of the content management system
called SPIP. SPIP is a publishing system for the internet
distributed under the General Public License (GPL) and developed
by e-zine uZine2. It is based on a MySql database. We will
discuss various questions which occur during the process of
transforming this online database tool into a topological
mapping tool.



Peggy Pierrot makes websites and radio programs, does
independent journalism and organizes parties.

Philippe Rivière programs SPIP content management system, edits
and develops the website of the journal Le Monde Diplomatique.



The Oil of the 21st Century
www.oil21.org oil21 at oil21.org

The Oil of the 21st Century is a project by Bootlab,
based on a concept by Partner gegen Berlin, produced
in cooperation with Sarai, The Thing and Waag Society,
and funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation.