Border Wars: Branding and Primacy

At the writing of this essay, an increasing number of legal conflicts are occurring that question the ability of corporate interests to express their sovereignty over cultural capital through legally claiming the right to supercede previously extant institutions. These conflicts center on the ownership and unambiguity of key domain names and recognizable identities, and the temporal primacy of such identity in the Net's memory, in the form of its search engines. From a theoretical perspective, these issues make clear that not only can there be no ambiguity on the system of symbolic production, but capital desires that there can be no similarity in space (cyber or other) or time. Primacy of identity must be assured. More pragmatically, the legal battles reveal the matrix of political, institutional, and legal powers that define the landscape of the information society. Two examples of international litigation that illuminate the issues of branding and primacy are those of etoy and the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology's journal, Leonardo.