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Social Stratification and Social Movements: Theoretical and Empirical

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Social Stratification and
Social Movements
Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives
on an Ambivalent Relationship

Edited by Sabrina Zajak and

Sebastian Haunss
4 New cleavages in the knowledge
society?
Social movements and the production,
use, and valorization of knowledge
Sebastian Haunss

Introduction
On 11 February 2012 tens of thousands of protesters in more than 200 cities
worldwide took to the streets to demonstrate against the Anti-Counterfeiting
Trade Agreement (ACTA) – an international treaty in which core industrialized
countries, led by the USA and Europe, tried to create an international organiza-
tion to strengthen and coordinate measures for the enforcement of intellectual
property rights (IPRs) (Kaminski 2011; Arthur 2012).
The protesters addressed an issue which twenty years earlier was generally
not seen as an area of political contention. While IPRs had been subject to
international regulation for more than hundred years, until recently they were
regulated behind closed doors in an administrative technocratic – and thus
depoliticized (Zürn, Binder, and Ecker-Ehrhardt 2012, 73) – mode of decision-
making. Over the last 20 years IPRs have been fundamentally politicized. This
is the result of active interventions from various actors, and at the same time,
the consequence of the growing economic importance of IPRs in advanced
knowledge societies.
In this chapter, I will argue that the emergence of protest mobilizations
around issues of online privacy, internet regulation, and IPRs is embedded in
and intertwined with structural social changes associated with the notion of
the knowledge society. I argue that especially the conflicts about intellectual
property claims are directly connected to the emergence of new societal
cleavages that are expressions of large-scale social change. This chapter thus
departs somewhat from the book’s focus on the impact of stratification on
social movements. Instead of trying to map the constituencies of the move-
ments studied in this chapter to the existing social strata of industrial soci-
eties, I claim that the transformation from industrial societies to knowledge
societies may create new social cleavages and thus may alter the structure of
stratifications that are relevant and meaningful for social movements. These
new cleavages do not replace the existing cleavages of industrial societies,
just like the labor-capital cleavage did not replace those of earlier societies.
But social transformations create new cleavages and change the relative cen-
trality of the older.
 New cleavages in the knowledge society? 49
In order to do this, this chapter starts with a brief discussion of the relation-
ship between conflict and social change (1). It proceeds with an analysis of the
role of IPRs in the knowledge society (2), discusses five processes that have led
to the politicization of intellectual property (3), introduces important protest
mobilizations in this issue area (4), and finally argues that the emerging social
movements should be interpreted in relation to the processes of social change in
the knowledge society (5).

Conflict and change

Are the current conflicts about IPRs results of processes of social change lead-
ing to the transformation of industrial societies into knowledge societies? Do
they belong to a new class of conflicts addressing new cleavages in the know-
ledge society, which are not represented in the cleavage structure of the (post-)
industrial society? In principle there are two possible ways to find answers to
these questions. The first option starts from a theory of conflicts and social
change. Such a theory links general conflict lines or cleavages to social change.
With regard to specific conflicts the question then only is whether or not they
address one of the cleavages at the heart of the current society. If – as I’ve
argued elsewhere (Haunss 2013, chap. 3) – such a theory is missing, a second
option is to start from the empirical analysis of actual conflicts that address core
pillars of the current social structure.
In the classical theories of society, conflicts and social change are connected
in a linear stage model. For Karl Marx (1961 [1859]), the emergence of capital-
ism had created a cleavage between capital and labor. Social conflicts that
address this cleavage are therefore the results of a historical dialectical process
in which societies advance from one stage to another and in which the core of
social conflict is replaced by another, finally culminating in a classless society.
This linear stage model of social conflicts and change is also present in the
writings of other classical theorists of social change like Emile Durkheim
(1933) or Talcot Parsons (1964), although there, it is not a dialectical process
but a sequence of order and disorder propelled by growing differentiation that
drives social development. While these theories of society differ fundamentally,
their model of conflicts and social change is nevertheless structurally similar in
assuming a very simple causal chain where social change leads to conflict,
which leads to new social change, leading to new conflicts, and so on. While
this is obviously a stark simplification and most authors realize that conflicts
have many more causes than social change, and that social change has more
sources than social conflict, the assumption in many classical social theories is
nevertheless that there is a simple linear relation between core processes of
social change and core conflicts.
More recent theorists of social change in the network (Castells 1996) or post-
industrial society (Touraine 1988) would not subscribe to such a simple model
of social change. Instead of one conflict associated with one process of social
change they see multiple conflicts that develop in parallel. This leads at
50 Sebastian Haunss
a structural level to a somewhat more complex model that allows for multiple,
independent conflicts. But at its core this model also remains a stage model of
social history. This cumulative model and the corresponding idea of society and
history in the singular has been criticized in the second half of the 20th century
from various authors, who have claimed that history is neither a linear nor
a unitary process, but rather develops in highly contingent and contradictory
ways and is made through the concrete interaction of collective actors (e.g.
Popper 1957; Nisbet 1970; Tilly 1984).
Their rejection of the idea of history as a unified process with a clearly defin-
able direction has shifted the perspective from a simple cause-and-effect model,
in which conflict is seen as a direct result of social change, to more complex
models in which social change alters the conditions and possibilities for con-
flictual interaction of various groups in society. This shift is particularly appar-
ent in Tilly’s work that often takes a broad historical perspective. Conflict
appears here neither as the consequence of the breakdown of social order in his-
torical processes of differentiation, nor as the result of inherent social contradic-
tions. For Tilly conflicts are rooted in concrete inequalities and power
differences. Structural social changes affect the conditions for collective action,
and his research tries to explain how the creation of nation-states, industrializa-
tion, and democratization enhance or restrict possibilities for collective action,
and influence the forms of action and the contents of public mobilizations (Tilly
1978, 2004).
By no longer asking primarily “How does society work or function?” and
instead asking “How do people make history?” Tilly and other critical historians
have shifted the perspective on social change and conflicts. The totalizing per-
spective of the classical theories of society is replaced by a detailed historical
or sociological perspective that still is interested in patterns and mechanisms,
but always in the plural. But in this detailed historical picture no theory emerges
that would link large-scale social change to specific social conflicts. A theory of
complex interactions of conflicts and social change is still missing. Such
a theory would have to link in a network model conflicts with other conflicts,
various processes of social change with each other, and conflicts with social
change (Haunss 2013, 87).
Without such a general theory no a priori claims can be made about the
expected structure of changing cleavages and developing social conflicts that
should be expected in the transition to the knowledge society. But even without
a general theory a number of prominent conflicts can be identified that have
recently begun to address a core pillar of the knowledge society: intellectual
property rights. Based on an empirical analysis of those conflicts it is possible
to judge, to which extent these mobilizations still fit into the cleavages and
stratifications of the industrial society and to which extent the emergence of
new collective actors addressing new cleavages can be observed. The empirical
analysis thus can reveal underlying conflict lines and emerging cleavages
beyond the concrete policy questions addressed in each conflict. From this per-
spective, and in line with some of the literature on the post-1960s new social
 New cleavages in the knowledge society? 51
movements (Offe 1985; Touraine 1988; Melucci 1996), social movements are
interpreted as indicators of new cleavage structures in contemporary societies.
Following this approach, I will present in the remainder of this chapter an
empirical analysis of the three most prominent large-scale protest mobilization
about issues of intellectual property and discuss to which more general conflict
lines these mobilizations speak.

IPRs in the knowledge society

The societal transformations at the end of the 20th century have been associated
with a transition from the industrial to an information society (Lyon 1988),
a network society (Castells 1996), a post-industrial society (Bell 1999 [1973]),
a knowledge society (Stehr 1994), a risk-society (Beck 1986), or a programmed
society (Touraine 1972). Behind this abundance of concepts lies the notion that
somehow the world today seems to differ significantly from the world about half
a century ago, and that this change is somehow related to the enhanced role
knowledge, information, and computer technologies play in current societies.
The changes that many observers describe comprise the economy, the political
institutions, and the cultural realm. While nation-states still are the dominant form
of social organization, their autonomy and power seem to diminish. Transnational
corporations, international organizations, and other non-governmental actors are
competing with governments for overlapping “spheres of authority,” which only
occasionally still coincide neatly with territorial borders (Rosenau 2002). The
industrial sector with its production based on the transformation of raw materials
into mass-produced consumer goods is losing its role as the prime source of wealth
and productivity in the countries of the Global North. Instead the service sector and
the production of immaterial goods are becoming the main pillars of prosperity and
economic growth (Bell 1999). Even the remotest regions of the world are subju-
gated under the command of the global economic order, although this integration is
far from equal. Global communication networks have expanded the possibilities of
information-exchange allowing the integration of financial markets in what Castells
has called “timeless time” (Castells 2000, 13), and laying the ground for cultural
globalization processes that detach communities from the constraints of physical
proximity (Held and McGrew 2002, 3).
Authors writing about the great social transformations in the late-20th and
early- 21st century disagree on many aspects regarding the scope, speed,
and consequences of the prognosticated social change, but even among those
who criticize the labels knowledge and information society, and who argue that
these terms are neither distinctive nor precise enough to characterize current
societies (Kumar 2005; Webster 2006) there is widespread agreement that
knowledge and information play an increasingly central role in current societies.
It is admittedly true that knowledge was already important in industrial societies
and that current societies are far too complex to be reduced to their structures
of knowledge creation, valorization, and use. But the term knowledge society
nevertheless addresses a core element of today’s social and economic structures.
52 Sebastian Haunss
Using the term “knowledge society” implies that today core social dynamics
depend on the production, appropriation, propertization, and distribution of
knowledge. This term does not describe a finite and unitary empirical object,
because societies are analytical abstractions to describe complex social struc-
tures. Like all analytical concepts they have no direct equivalence in the empir-
ical world. In this sense knowledge society is a metaphor that tries to capture
one core aspect that drives current processes of social change. Like every meta-
phor it is incomplete, because in any empirical social structure knowledge
dynamics are never the only mechanisms that structure the relationships among
actors, organizations, and institutions (Haunss 2013, chap. 3).
In particular, today’s knowledge societies are also capitalist societies, in
which immaterial and material property rights are the core supporting pillars of
the market order. Only the propertization of goods creates the necessary precon-
dition for their appropriation and exchange in anonymous capitalist markets.
With regard to material goods the question which material goods can and
should be privately appropriated to what extent and by which actors has always
been subject to political struggles in modern societies. The propertization of
immaterial goods has only recently become an issue of social conflicts. IPRs,
the legal base of the propertization of immaterial goods, have been established
and adjusted until recently in purely technocratic-administrative procedures,
involving only a relatively small epistemic community of legal experts and
interested parties (Hofmann 2006).
IPRs are state-backed temporary monopolies to exclude others from using
a patented innovation or a copyright-protected creative work without the con-
sent of the creator. The three most important IPRs are patents, copyrights, and
trademarks. Trademarks differ systematically from the other two as they do not
protect innovation, but rather are in their core a mechanism to secure trust
between buyers and sellers. They predate by far the other forms of IPRs and
can be traced back to the Roman Empire (May and Sell 2006, 10). Other IPRs
that cover industrial designs, microprocessor layouts (masks), databases, plant
varieties, or geographical indications are in essence special cases of the three
core rights.
While a trademark may often exceed the value of any given patent, copy-
rights and patents are nevertheless the more important IPRs, as they occupy
structurally important positions that allow them to function as regulatory mech-
anisms for the core processes of generating, commercializing, and accessing
knowledge in current societies.

The politicization of intellectual property

The last two decades saw a politicization of intellectual property (IP) which
was driven by five processes: the growing economic importance of knowledge-
based industries, the growing internationalization of IP, the growing attention
IP issues receive in non-specialist and high-level political fora, the trend to per-
sonalize IP rules, and an increasing number of contentious mobilizations
 New cleavages in the knowledge society? 53
around IP issues. The first process is a result of changing economic structures,
the second and third reflect these changes at the level of international institu-
tions and legal norms. The fourth process connects macro-economic changes
with changing social practices, and fifth brings in new collective actors and
claims. I will briefly discuss the first four processes and then address in more
depth the emergence of contentious mobilizations and its relation to structural
changes in the knowledge society.
The growing economic importance of knowledge-based industries and the
resulting growing importance of IPRs has been extensively discussed in the sci-
entific literature (Arrow 1962; Drahos 1995; Park and Ginarte 1997; May 2000;
Pugatch 2004; Yu 2007, 2009). If we take the volume of the international trade
in royalties and license fees as a very rough indicator for the development of
knowledge-based industries, OECD statistics show a dramatic rise of the eco-
nomic value of these goods in the last 30 years (OECD 2014; WTO and OECD
2018). For the USA, the volume in trade in royalties and license fees has
increased by a factor of 18 between 1986 and 2016, a growth rate that is more
than two times higher than that of the overall service sector, which grew in the
same time by a factor of 7.6. By 2017, the US industry had received about
$128 billion in revenues for royalty fees and licenses. In the EU trade in royalty
fees and licenses grew even stronger than in the US but the EU remains a net
importer of IP goods (Haunss 2013, 15).
Even if a clear indicator that measures the share of IPRs in the economic
strength of a country is still lacking, there is consensus that the economic
importance of the economic sectors that rely heavily on the protection of know-
ledge through IPRs, has increased significantly in the last decades. The growing
economic importance of IP-protected goods has focused the attention of polit-
ical decision-makers and civil-society actors on the rules and legal frameworks
that govern the creation of intellectual property and thus has contributed to its
politicization.
The growing economic importance of IP industries goes along with
a growing internationalization of IP politics and rules. The institutions that
govern IP are not particularly new. The Berne Convention for the Protection of
Literary and Artistic Works that governs copyrights and related rights came into
existence 1886 and was last revised 1971, the Paris Convention for the Protec-
tion of Industrial Property that governs, among others, patents, trademarks, and
designs dates back to 1883. But these international treaties did not contain bind-
ing minimum standards and have only led to a rather limited harmonization of
IP laws among its member states. The real push for an internationalization of IP
rules came with the 1994 Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual
Property Rights (TRIPS), which has substantially changed the international
framework of IP regulation. Because the TRIPS agreement is an integral part of
the WTO treaty, all WTO member states are now required to establish a set of
substantive minimum standards of IP protection far beyond what most develop-
ing countries would have liked to provide and even exceeding the standards of
many developed countries at that time (Deere 2009, 1). Several in-depth studies
54 Sebastian Haunss
have analyzed the process by which the agreement was reached and its conse-
quences for developed and developing countries (Correa 2000; May 2000;
Maskus 2000a, 2000b; Sell 2003; Drahos 2005; May and Sell 2006; Deere
2009). Today a multitude of international treaties govern IPRs, and IP issues are
implicated in almost every ongoing international trade negotiation.
The internationalization of IP and the global strengthening of IP rules was
the result of a consolidated lobbying effort of mainly US industry interest
groups (Sell 1995). But this internationalization has also created political oppor-
tunities at the international level for new coalitions of actors opposing stronger
IPRs, and thus has effectively contributed to the politicization of IP.
The growing economic importance and internationalization of IP is accom-
panied by the growing attention IP issues have received in non-specialist and
high-level political fora, which is at the same time a result of the first two pro-
cesses and which further accelerates them.
The most prominent of these high-level fora is probably the G7/G8. For most
of the now more than 40 years of G7/G8 meetings IPRs did not occupy promin-
ent positions. On the contrary: In the summit documents from 23 out of 44
meetings between 1975 and 2018 IPRs were not mentioned at all, and most of
the time, even if they were mentioned, they occurred as a minor point without
much emphasis. This changes in 2004 when IP starts to become an important
issue, so that in the concluding statement of the 2007 G8 meeting in Heiligen-
damm, Germany, IPRs are addressed as the 4th topic after global growth and
stability, financial markets, and freedom of investment, and before climate
change, responsibility for raw materials, corruption, and trade. Under the head-
ing “Promoting Innovation – Protecting Innovation” it is claimed that “innov-
ation needs to be protected worldwide. IPRs are a critical precondition for
innovation. The protection of IPRs is of core interest for consumers in all coun-
tries, particularly in developing countries” (G8 2007).
The European Parliament is another political institution where one was able
to observe the transition from IP perceived as a “technical issue” which should
be handled by experts in specialist committees to an issue of general political
interest which is debated in the plenary and where parliamentarians no longer
blindly follow the experts’ opinion. The transition occurred during the conflict
about a European directive proposed by the Commission which would have
secured the legal grounds for granting software patents in Europe, but which
was rejected by the parliament with an overwhelming majority and after
a highly politicized conflict (Haunss and Kohlmorgen 2010). During this con-
flict the Commission’s and the European Parliament’s initial perception that
software patents would be a highly technical, arcane, and specialist issue of
patent legislation was profoundly changed after civil-society actors mobilized
a successful protest campaign against the directive. The European Parliament’s
rejection of ACTA shows that the politicization is sustainable and has altered
the European Parliament’s perspective on IP issues.
A fourth process that is driving the politicization of IP is the trend to personalize
intellectual property rules so that they now directly affect an increasing number of
 New cleavages in the knowledge society? 55
citizens in their everyday practices. Traditionally IPRs regulated relationships
between industrial market actors and were mainly aimed at firms, corporate actors,
or at least entrepreneurs. At their core they regulated the industrial production of
knowledge and information. Until recently, as James Boyle has aptly noted, for an
individual citizen “it used to be relatively hard to violate an intellectual property
right” (Boyle 2003, 40). With digitalization and the proliferation of the internet
this has changed fundamentally, so that IP laws now increasingly target individual
citizens who do not profit economically from their incriminated activities of file-
sharing or otherwise using and providing IP-protected content. This extension in
terms of addressees makes IPRs increasingly an issue of general public interest
and thus an issue that is more likely to be addressed in a conflictual political and
not in an a-political mode of decision-making.
The fifth process which is – like the third and fourth process – at the same
time driving the politicization of IP and a result of its increasing politicization
is the emergence of contentious mobilizations around IP issues. In the next sec-
tion I will take a closer look at the most prominent mobilizations that emerged
in the last two decades and discuss how these mobilizations are related to struc-
tural changes in the knowledge society.

Contentious mobilizations about IP

In their long history intellectual property rights have often been contested and
states did not necessarily support strong IPRs. Switzerland, for example, did not
recognize foreign product patents for pharmaceutical products until 1977. In order
to protect its emerging pharmaceutical industry it only introduced the much
weaker form of process patents for chemical compounds in 1907 after consider-
able pressure from the USA and Germany, and pharmaceutical product patents
only after the Swiss pharmaceutical industry had well established their leading
position in the world market (May and Sell 2006, 113; Boldrin and Levine 2008,
216). Until recently IP conflicts usually were inter-state conflicts, or they were
conflicts between competing industry interests within a nation-state.
This constellation has only started to change in the last two decades with the
emergence of social movements addressing issues of IP and access to know-
ledge. Among these mobilizations three stick out because of their mobilization
dynamics and scale: The conflict about access to medicines, the mobilization
against software patents in Europe, and the anti-ACTA mobilization. I will
briefly introduce each of these conflicts and then discuss how they are related to
structural changes in the knowledge society.

Access to medicines
On a global level, the broadest and most prominent conflictual mobilization
about IPRs is the one about access to (essential) medicines. It addresses the
effects of patents for pharmaceutical products on access to drugs for patients
living in countries of the Global South (’t Hoen 2002; Mayne 2002). It was
56 Sebastian Haunss
fueled, in particular, by the issue of access to HIV/AIDS medication in sub-
Saharan Africa and Asia. The coordinates for this conflict were set by the dual
dynamics of an accelerating rate of HIV infections in a number of developing
countries in Africa, Asia, and South America and a ratcheting up of IP protec-
tion that culminated in the 1995 TRIPS agreement (’t Hoen 2002; Sell 2002;
Sell and Prakash 2004). The main claim of the access to medicines coalition is
that the strengthened IPRs after TRIPS result in prices that are too high for
essential medicines, making them unavailable for patients in the Global South.
Instead of protecting the interests of the pharmaceutical industry by granting
them far-reaching monopolies, global health and trade policies should instead
give public health concerns primacy over economic interests and encourage
developing countries to limit the scope of IPRs (Haunss 2013, 175f.).
The driving force behind the access to medicines conflict is a coalition of
NGOs that came together in the late 1990s and has remained at its core rela-
tively constant. The literature (Sell 2002; Ford 2004; Ford et al. 2004; Munoz
Tellez 2006; Matthews 2007; Kapczynski 2008; Clapham and Robinson 2009; ’t
Hoen 2009; Haunss 2013) has identified a handful of core NGOs that played
a central role in the conflict. These are the US-American NGO Consumer Pro-
ject on Technology (CPTech), the international network of health, development,
and consumer organizations Health Action International (HAI), the British NGO
Oxfam, US-American and French chapters of the gay AIDS activist network
ACT UP, the South African Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), and the inter-
national humanitarian aid organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). Many
of these groups are themselves umbrella organizations with numerous members,
or organizations with regional units in many countries. The actual network of
NGOs involved in the access to medicines conflict is thus significantly larger
and includes organizations and individuals from the Global North and South.
But the mobilization for access to medicines is not limited to this trans-
national advocacy network (Keck and Sikkink 1998). It also involves intensive
grassroots mobilization of people living with HIV/AIDS in developing countries
and large-scale protests that were supported by local unions (e.g. South Africa)
or groups mobilizing against neoliberal economic globalization (e.g. Thailand).
In the course of the conflict the activists from NGOs, protest mobilizations,
and academia established cooperative relationships and formed coalitions with
international organizations (WHO, WIPO, UNCTAD) and national administra-
tions from developing countries and emerging economies (South Africa, Brazil,
India, Thailand).
Without the structural social and economic changes in the transition to
a knowledge society the mobilization about access to medicines would not have
happened. The growing economic importance of knowledge goods that allowed
industry interest to successfully push for a strong global IP regime has created
the opportunities for the access to medicines mobilization to emerge. The emer-
ging social movement questions the foundations of the now dominant economic
and political assumption that strong IPRs are in the interest of all trading part-
ners in the global economy, and that they would foster development in the
 New cleavages in the knowledge society? 57
countries of the South. But the mobilization goes beyond the policy level and
questions on a more general normative level the balance between economic and
social foundations of IPRs – whether social welfare should be seen as
a secondary effect of economic prosperity driven by IPRs, or whether social
welfare should be considered in its own right as a possible limiting condition
for IPRs. On this more abstract level the conflict questions the property order of
the knowledge society. Its protagonists have a different socio-economic back-
ground than the social movement that questioned the property order of the
industrial society – the workers’ movement. The conflict about the property
order of the knowledge society thus creates new collective actors, representing
a different cleavage than the conflict about the property order of the industrial
society.
The mobilization addresses an issue which had no salience in the industrial
society. It politicizes a new cleavage about the limits of property in immaterial
goods which emerges only as a result of fundamental changes in the current
social and economic structure. It also questions the dominant mode of innov-
ation by claiming that medical innovation should not (only) be driven by profit
but by the needs of patients.
The access to medicines conflict is connected to the structural changes of the
knowledge society, but not in a simple cause-and-effect model but in a more
complex network model of social conflict and social change (Haunss 2013, 87).
Like every social movement, also this contentious mobilization is not simply
a reflection of social changes and environmental conditions. It required the
agency of movement entrepreneurs and their ability to frame the issue of access
to medicines in a way that it became conductive for a global and diverse mobil-
ization. Changes in the global power structure between the core industrialized
countries of the north and the emerging BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China,
South Africa) powers offered a favorable opportunity structure for this trans-
national mobilization that connected HIV/AIDS patient initiatives in Thailand
with health officials in Brazil and academics in US elite universities.

Software patents
Compared to the access to medicines conflict, the conflict about software
patents in Europe was more limited in its regional scope, was focused prima
facie on a more limited policy issues, but was also more intense in terms of
mobilization. From its beginning in 1997, to its end in 2005, a large network of
actors became involved in a conflictual mobilization that brought the former
arcane and specialist issue of software patent legislation into the TV evening
news (Eckl 2005; Albers 2009; Eimer 2011; Leifeld and Haunss 2012; Haunss
2013, chap. 4). The conflict started in June 1997 when the European Commis-
sion published a Green Paper on the Community patent and the patent system
in Europe (COM 1997). It ended eight years later on 6 June 2005 when the
European Parliament rejected the directive on the patentability of computer-
implemented inventions (COM 2002) with a majority of 648 to 14 votes.
58 Sebastian Haunss
Between these dates lies a contentious mobilization in which new collective
actors emerged and entered the arena of IP politics in Europe, and which has
lastingly altered the power relations in this field.
The mobilization against software patents initially started as a campaign
driven by software developers working mostly for small and medium sized
companies (SMEs) and with strong connections to the free and open source
software (FOSS) community. A handful of activists founded at the very begin-
ning of the conflict the NGO Federation for a Free Information Infrastructure
(FFII) which became an important hub in the activist network. This network
grew quickly to comprise at the end of the conflict several hundred core activ-
ists and organizations, establishing close cooperation relationships with numer-
ous members of the European Parliament and reaching out to tens of thousands
of supporters. The activists used a broad spectrum of protest forms including
petitions, lobbying, demonstrations, and internet protests.
The activists’ original argument was that the introduction of software patents
in Europe would benefit only a small number of large corporations and thus
would destroy the business model of the many SMEs in the IT sector. During
the mobilization this core story was expanded to cover the issues of monopoly
power and the democratic process, thus broadening the scope of the argumenta-
tion and providing discursive access points and bridges for actors outside the IT
industry. They thus developed a coherent set of frames which were shared by
a large number of activists. In its center stand innovation, the competitiveness
of SMEs, democracy, monopolies, and growth. These core frames were embed-
ded in a number of broader frames that address questions of creativity, freedom
of speech, consumer rights, and open access to knowledge and information.
On an abstract level the conflict about software patents in Europe was at its
core a conflict about innovation and transfer of knowledge, in which two clearly
distinguishable models of innovation stood against each other, a model of indus-
trial innovation against a model of open innovation. Industrial innovation, as
advanced by the European Commission, the large industry associations, and
transnational IT firms assumes that innovation is located (mainly) in large-scale
industrial units. It is seen as the result of organized efforts of economic actors
who spend significant resources to produce innovative knowledge that can be
used in industrial production processes. Industrial innovation relies on exclusive
access to and propertization of knowledge. The current IP system, and espe-
cially the patent system, are designed to fulfill this mission.
The alternative model of open innovation was advanced by the opponents of
the software patent directive and starts from a very different assumption that
innovation is at its core a dispersed and distributed process without centralized
control. Innovation is seen as mainly incremental and not restricted to large-
scale facilities. The core principle is general access to knowledge and informa-
tion, because only under this premise can future innovation productively build
on existing knowledge. Within the open innovation paradigm actors have
a strong interest in a legal framework that supports the creation of a knowledge
commons that is freely accessible for everyone.
 New cleavages in the knowledge society? 59
While the access to medicines conflict addresses primarily the limits of prop-
ertization of knowledge, the main focus of the software patents conflict is on
the mode of knowledge production. In parallel to the conflicts at the beginning
of the industrial age where the industrial production of material goods super-
seded in many areas manual production, we now have a similar conflict line in
the immaterial sphere. Only this time the decentralized production model sets
out to challenge the industrial model – a dynamic that is made possible by the
radical lowering of transaction costs in networked social production and cooper-
ation structures (Benkler 2006).
Like in the case of access to medicines, the software patents conflict was on
its surface a classical policy conflict about a very limited detail of legal regula-
tion. But on a more abstract level it addresses a new cleavage of the knowledge
society and mobilizes new collective actors. Again, it is not immediately caused
by the current changes in the social and economic structure, but without these
changes it would not have happened. Also, the structural changes did not just
provide an immutable background for the conflict. Instead, the parties involved
in the conflict have actively tried to intervene in the processes of social change
and tried to shape it in ways that contradict the dominant order. While it is still
too early to speculate about the chances for success of these interventions it
reminds us that the relationship between social movements and structural social
change are not a one-way street, but that social change can itself be shaped by
social movements.

The ACTA protests

The protests against the ACTA show many similarities to the access to medi-
cines and the software patents mobilization. The protests were initiated by
NGOs and individuals who mostly had also been involved in the two other
mobilizations, notably MSF, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI, formerly
CPTech), FFII, the developing countries’ think tank and intergovernmental
organization “The South Centre,” the European civil-society umbrella organiza-
tion “European Digital rights” (EDRi), and the French NGO “La Quadrature du
Net” – the latter two both were founded during the software patents conflict.
ACTA was an attempt by core industrialized countries, led by the USA and
Europe, to create an international organization to strengthen and coordinate
measures for IPRs enforcement. Negotiations of the plurilateral treaty started in
2008 and were shrouded in selective secrecy. The draft text was not made pub-
licly available, and the European Commission for a long time even denied the
European Parliament access to the draft treaty whereas that information was
available to the negotiating national governments and selected industry stake-
holders which were invited to the negotiations.
Civil-society groups initially focused on the secrecy of the negotiations,
demanded access to the documents, and voiced their concerns that the treaty
would target individual internet users and further restrict the availability of gen-
eric medicines (Essential Action 2008). After an early draft was leaked in
60 Sebastian Haunss
May 2008 the text confirmed their concerns, as the treaty was meant to cover
all acts of IP infringement, regardless of intended or realized financial gains
(Kaminski 2011). In the final text the scope has been considerably reduced, tar-
geting now only “commercial activities for direct or indirect economic or com-
mercial advantage” (Council of the European Union 2011, Art. 23.1).
While civil-society groups critically followed the negotiations, protests
only really gained momentum after the end of the treaty negotiations, when
the participating nation-states and the European Parliament were about to
ratify the treaty. These protests in the early month of 2012 profited from pre-
existing organizational networks from earlier campaigns on internet and IP
politics (Rone 2018) and from the highly visible online-campaigns against
the proposed US laws Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP
Act (PIPA), in which several million US citizens contacted their representa-
tives (Weisman 2012), and in which several prominent websites, among them
the English language Wikipedia, blacked out their website for one day to pro-
test against the legislation. Encouraged by the successful US campaign and
by the surprisingly vocal protests that met the ACTA ratification in Poland,
a loose network of people and organizations started to mobilize for coordin-
ated European-wide demonstrations against the treaty, culminating in more
than 200 demonstrations with tens of thousands of participants (Beckedahl
2012, 206). This strong civil-society mobilization ultimately led to European
Parliament’s rejection of the agreement, and thus its de-facto international
failure (Matthews 2012).
The campaign addressed an issue that many citizens regarded as important
enough, so that they organized and joined demonstrations at freezing temperat-
ures. The mobilizations around ACTA in Europe and about SOPA/PIPA in the
US thus reflect the changing scope of IPRs enforcement that increasingly targets
individual citizens and criminalizes their practices of using and sharing digital
information. The protesters see this extension of enforcement practices as an
illegitimate restriction of their everyday use of knowledge goods. They combine
claims for limits to the propertization of knowledge goods with claims for more
transparent and more democratic procedures in the governance of knowledge
goods, and with claims for digital civil rights.

IP conflicts and social change

The brief empirical analysis of the three contentious mobilizations suggests that
these IP conflicts are indeed related to macro-structural changes in current soci-
eties. The social movements which are driving these conflicts are not simply
a result of those macro-structural social changes. But the social and economic
changes that come with the transition from an industrial to a knowledge society
create conditions that enable the development of these conflicts and the emer-
gence of social movements addressing these conflicts.
Beyond their concrete policy goals, the contentious mobilizations around
access to medicines, software patents, and the ACTA address conflict lines that
 New cleavages in the knowledge society? 61
have only emerged in the transition to the knowledge society: the limits of
propertization of immaterial goods, the mode of innovation, and the rules that
govern access to knowledge. These conflicts are no longer limited to specific
parts of the economy but extend to many parts of the society. IPRs are no
longer only relevant for a subset of economic actors in the so-called IP indus-
tries but for all sectors in the society, and thus are prone to contentious mobil-
izations involving a broad constituency.
These mobilizations are related to other developments that address the same
issues but not in the traditional form of social movement mobilizations: The
steady growth of the Creative Commons project and the emergence and decline
of Pirate Parties.
Creative Commons is a non-governmental organization founded in 2001 as
a US charitable corporation by a group of US-American academics and intellec-
tuals. It offers a set of copyright licenses and a web-based interface to attach
these licenses to digital works, so that they can be reliably identified and searched
over the internet. It builds on the concept of a “copyleft” license, the “GNU Gen-
eral Public license” (GPL), originally developed within the FOSS community,
a license that effectively reverses the workings of the established copyrights
system by granting public access instead of reserving all rights. Within ten years,
Creative Commons grew from an abstract idea to a set of licenses used world-
wide, making several hundred thousand documents, images, sound, and video
files available for everyone to use freely and for non-commercial (and sometimes
also commercial) purposes. By turning the exclusivity of the existing copyright
on its head, Creative Commons has helped secure free access to all sorts of digi-
tal cultural goods, available on the internet (Lessig 2003; Bollier 2008; Haunss
2013, chap. 6). It creates an alternative governance option to the exclusive and
property-centered established mode of governing the creation, use, and distribu-
tion of knowledge and counters the property narrative with a narrative of know-
ledge-sharing and cooperation (Aigrain 2012).
Pirate Parties emerged in 2006, first in Sweden, and then in more than
a dozen other countries, and have gained surprising electoral support in the
2009 election to the European Parliament in Sweden and in several state-level
elections in Germany (Demker 2011; Bieber and Leggewie 2012; Haunss 2013,
chap. 6; Niedermayer 2013). Their electoral success proved to be short-lived
and in subsequent elections they were not able to gain enough votes to pass
again the electoral threshold. Pirate parties are an attempt to address the know-
ledge society’s cleavages about the governance of knowledge and digital civil
rights within the electoral system, but in the two countries where they had some
electoral success they are still involved in extra-parliamentary protest
campaigns.
Together, the contentious mobilization that comprise protests, lobbying, elect-
oral competition, and the creation of alternative governance structures, are con-
ditioned by structural changes in the knowledge society, by the growing
economic importance of knowledge goods and the resulting institutional and
power-shifts. At the same time these mobilizations drive and/or accelerate the
62 Sebastian Haunss
politicization of core processes and of institutional and normative frameworks
of the knowledge society. They thus have the potential to alter the trajectory of
social change. Whether, and to which degree, they will influence processes of
social change will depend not the least on their ability to create powerful col-
lective actors – new social movements of the knowledge society. So far the sep-
arate mobilizations have not yet established a resonating and overarching
master frame connecting the different policy conflicts and providing a term for
the new cleavage. The notion that “Access to Knowledge” might provide
a meta-narrative for such a movement (Kapczynski 2010; Krikorian and Kapc-
zynski 2010) is not convincing as it is too narrow to unite the critique of imma-
terial property, demands for alternative modes of innovation, digital civil rights,
and the project of a culture of sharing. While there exists so far not one social
movement of the knowledge society, there are numerous conflictual mobiliza-
tions that address the current society’s core conflict lines and that have the
potential to alter its trajectory of social change.
By questioning the current rules and procedures for the production of know-
ledge and the dominant mode of innovation, by demanding limits to the proper-
tization of knowledge, and by developing claims for a democratic governance of
(access to) knowledge, the currently visible conflicts address three aspects of
a new conflict line that is no longer embedded in the cleavage structure of indus-
trial societies and represented by established collective actors. This new conflict
line does not render the old cleavages obsolete but introduces a new stratifying
element to the social structure of current societies. As such it will have an impact
on social movements mobilizing around other issues as well. And we can already
see that IP issues are picked up in the global justice movement, in the recent
wave of occupy protests, and in mobilizations about consumer protection.

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