Published: 2000-12-31

From Kant to Foucault. What is there left of the copyright law?

Gilbert Larochelle

Abstract

The concept of „intellectual property”, in its modern sense, was formed in the 18th c. It is derived directly from the philosophy of subject (or, more precisely, from Kant’s and Fichte’s philosophy), from the conceptualisation of that subject’s status as „the author", and from recognising his work as a „commodity" in the commodity exchange. The legal distinction in question served then the purpose of establishing the normative and legal foundations of the copyright, which postulated a substantial connection between the book and the person of its creator. The critics, however, of modern institutions have completely demolished the above scheme. It is particularly the representatives of post-structuralism that defend the idea of a radical separation between the subject and the work. The present article attempts to answer the question: is plagiarism still possible in a world of ideas in which all possibility of identifying the work's origin, of distinguishing between a copy and the original, disappears? The theses advanced by Kante and Fichte and concerning the nature of the book have been here compared with Foucault’s position which denies the subject’s function as the author. Further on. the concept of responsibility for the text been cited as an idea that does not have to be seen from Kant's ontological perspective, and an attempt has been made to restore the subject to the environment of its work, and to show that the post-modern concept of the author remains
impracticable.

Download files

Citation rules

Larochelle, G. (2000). From Kant to Foucault. What is there left of the copyright law?. Folia Philosophica, 18, 223–237. https://doi.org/10.31261/fp.20833

Cited by / Share

Licence

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


The Copyright Owners of the submitted texts grant the Reader the right to use the pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative Commons 4.0 International License: Attribution-Share-Alike (CC BY-SA). The user can copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose.

1. License

The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

2. Author’s Warranties

The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.

If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International".

ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).

3. User Rights

Under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

4. Co-Authorship

If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.

I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.

Domyślna okładka

Vol. 18 (2000)
Published: 2000-12-31


ISSN: 1231-0913
eISSN: 2353-9445
Ikona DOI 10.31261/fp

Publisher
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego | University of Silesia Press

Licence CC Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This website uses cookies for proper operation, in order to use the portal fully you must accept cookies.