The next salient socio-economic development was the corporate push to fortify and extend the purview of intellectual property in general in the period following 1980. In the legal and business literature, this is now regarded as one of the major watersheds of recent modern economic history. The fact that this ‘enclosure movement’ has not been restricted to the US and Europe, but has been in intent and execution a global initiative, speaks volumes about how the status of knowledge has become a source of naked political controversy in the modern world. Once again, for the purposes of this contribution we must take this phenomenon as exogenous and given, and yet it is difficult to overstate its importance for our present topic. Although the fortification of patent protection has tended to receive the lion’s share of attention, the conduct of science has been equally impaired by alterations in the terms and conditions of copyright and extensions of tort law into novel areas of ‘research tools,’ and the imposition of non-disclosure through contracts. It will shortly be helpful to keep in mind that it was not the university sector that sought in any material sense to bring about this Great Transformation.

In one rather gross sense, the drive to capture all manner of intellectual artifacts, subjecting them to finely-specified formal contractual relations and market discipline is the culmination of all the previous trends covered so far: the creeping objectification of information, fallout from the mechanization of thought by the computer and low-cost instantaneous forms of communication such as the Internet, the collapse of socialism and hence an ideologically bipolar world where politically sensitive areas were kept fenced off, the de-industrialization of the West, and the conviction that economic growth derives from scientific research and development. The proximate causes of individual components of the onslaught are fairly well understood: for instance, the explosion of patent litigation in the US is a direct consequence of the creation of a special Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in 1982; the notorious Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act of 1998 increased the horizon of US copyright to the author lifetime plus 70 years; the Uruguay Round negotiations in the GATT talks finally made TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property) and its attendant imposition of IP law upon other countries effective starting in 1994. But what tends to be missing from most of this literature is sufficient appreciation of the fact that each of these forays, across the wide gamut of IP forms, occurred within a relative short space of time, and moreover, sometimes involved many of the same corporate protagonists—certain select pharmaceutical and entertainment companies, in particular, tended to pop up over and over again. Once one comes to acknowledge the stupendous scale and scope of the interventions that were required to transform highly technical public policy towards numerous forms of IP, and not just in one country, but across the board, then the idea that this watershed could be explained by a simple change in the exogenous costs and benefits of pursuit of stronger IP due to technical progress in the computer industry becomes thoroughly implausible.

The abiding presence of legal counsel in any scientific research program sporting ambitions beyond armchair speculation is the defining attribute of the modern regime of science funding and management. Science hasn’t just gotten personally more difficult for Viridiana; the cast of characters has been irreversibly altered. And while universities at the turn of the millennium were being forced to police their own student bodies to make them stop downloading free music and videos over the college server, this was just a warm-up for the real action, which involved the dissolution of the library as a core university function and the privatization of any proprietary academic information conveyed over the web.

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