Considering Multiple and Overlapping Sovereignties: Liberalism, Libertarianism, National Sovereignty, Global Intellectual Property, and the Internet
![handle is hein.journals/ijgls5 and id is 449 raw text is: Considering Multiple and Overlapping
Sovereignties: Liberalism, Libertarianism,
National Sovereignty, Global Intellectual
Property, and the Internet
KEITH AOKI*
INTRODUCTION
The Internet is not a threat to sovereignty, and sovereignty is not a threat
to the Internet. By rejecting the formulation of the question, Is the Internet a
threat to sovereignty, I do not mean to suggest that our notions of sovereignty
are not currently undergoing profound transformations (they certainly are) or
that the Internet has had no role in bringing about those transformations (it
certainly has). My intent is instead to point out how certain liberal assumptions
about the Internet under the Rule of Law may be hard-wired into our
information policy and legal discourse. Consequently, there is a marked trend
toward favoring ideas like upward harmonization and other universalizing
moves and a concomitant discounting or erasure of the local, with disturbing
effects on the political economy of information that flows through global
networks such as the Internet.'
There is no single monolithic concept of sovereignty to be threatened-we
already live in a world of multiple, overlapping, contradictory, and oftentimes
intensely contested sovereignties.' Professor Ethan Katsh writes:
* Associate Professor of Law, University of Oregon School of Law. LL.M., 1992, University of
Wisconsin Law School; J.D., cum laude, 1990, Harvard Law School; M.A., 1986, Hunter College; B.F.A.,
Wayne State University. Thanks are due to James Boyle, Margaret Chon, Rosemary Coombe, Ruth Gana, and
Ileana Porras, whose works continue to educate me. Thanks also to my colleague, Ibrahim Gassama, for his
comments and to Professor David Fidler for inviting me to participate in this symposium.
1. See Keith Aoki, (Intellectual) Property and Sovereignty: Notes Toward a Cultural Geography of
Authorship, 48 STAN. L. REv. 1293 (1996).
2. BENEDICT ANDERSON, IMAGINED CoMMuNrTIEs: REFLECTIONS ON THE ORIGIN AND SPREAD OF
NATIONALISM 4 (1991).
[N]ationality, or, as one might prefer to put it in view of that word's multiple
significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular
kind.... [W]e need to consider carefully how they have come into historical being, in
what ways their meanings have changed over time, and why, today, they command such
profound emotional legitimacy. I will be trying to argue that the creation of these
artefacts towards the end of the eighteenth century was the spontaneous distillation of
a complex crossing of discrete historical forces; but that, once created, they became](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/ijgls5&div=30&collection=journals&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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