ABSTRACT
Marshall McLuhan's ideas emerge from a specific, postcolonial 'Canadian stance', even as they speak to general, globalized and postmodern concerns. Canadian dubjectivity entails both the technological 'extension of one own bodies and senses' and the 'lease of one central nervous systems to various corporations'. By embodying the dialectic of propriety and appropriation in remediation, to the dubject amplifies McLuhan's under-appreciated but significant comments on 'the corporate', and on issues of intellectual property. McLuhan argues that television 'invests an occasion with the character of corporate participation in The Medium is the Massage. This chapter explores that dozens of vendors offer web-conferencing solutions, as discovered by Athabasca University's (AU) committee struck to select a new one for official adoption. It explains screen frame of the Connect interface, which is Adobe's copyrighted property. The impact of ubiquitous, networked, digital copying on intellectual property regulation has prompted a global mess of law struggling to keep pace with, or rein in, technology, via reactionary legislation.
