This chapter assesses the neoliberalization of copyright law.It begins with the historical emergence of copyright as a form of public biopolitics.It then looks at three areas where copyright has become neoliberal.The first is incentives theory, which treats all creation as an economic calculation geared toward market rewards.I outline the theory, and show how it works not just to model, but to produce a certain kind of creator, to the exclusion of other forms of creativity.The second is litigation around hip-hop sampling.Here the demand for licensing works to nudge music into commercial channels, where all cultural borrowing is mediated through market transactions.The third is the recent expansion of copyright into what scholars have termed “paracopyright”: a prohibition on circumventing copyright protection technologies, which generally function as forms of “digital rights management” (DRM). Through a detailed examination of how DRM technologies (such as the regional restrictions on DVDs) function, I show how this addition to the law clearly marks a move in the direction of copyright into training individuals that they are consumers of the products of culture.

The chapter historicises the economics of music in the current age of technological automation – from the invention of intellectual property to the implementation of lock-down technologies at the turn of the twenty-first century. The first section sketches the basic characteristics of music’s technological, legal and political economies. By the late twentieth century, the precarious markets for music – enclosed within large-scale cycles of boom and bust in the nineteenth century – had morphed into a relatively stable set of intersecting industrial networks, including print, radio and phonograph. The second section sketches a transition period for the music industry in the context of distributed digital networks that emerged after the Cold War, producing a disjuncture between practice and policy. The third section traces the dialectics of intellectual property regimes pertaining to digital rights management, arguing that a covert allomorphism of the law effectively disabled both technical and legal functionalities pertaining to music.

Chapter 2 tackles a key technological concept – the various file formats used in the design and manufacturing process. These include design files (CAD), surface-mesh files (STL), and machine-instruction files (GCODE). Understanding how IP law will apply to 3D printing requires an understanding of these file formats because the law will treat each format differently. Crucially, 3D printing technology shifts economic value from tangible objects to these file formats, particularly to surface-mesh files, which are the most widely sold format. This change in the locus of economic value is important because IP law may not protect 3D printable files in the same manner as tangible objects. The chapter also describes the various kinds of 3D printers on the market and important complementary technologies, like 3D scanners. Finally, it describes the many participants in the IP ecosystem.