Property Rights Control in the Data-Driven Economy: The Media Ecology of Blockchain Registries

The data-driven economy is fueled by massive amounts of information and other “intangible” expressions such as new technologies, photographic images, moving images, artworks, and texts. The materialities of the intangible economy reach far beyond cultural or technological inventions. For this reason, it is crucial to develop theories that manage to visualize the extent of property control over intangible resources, including both the environmental aspects of the data-driven economy and in a wider ecological aspect, how affective transmissions are enabled and controlled via proprietary rights. This chapter draws upon new materialist theory to challenge the notion that intellectual property rights (IPR) only deal with intellectual expressions by moving through a number of recent cases where such assumptions have come to be displaced.