ABSTRACT
The essay turns the debate on academic freedom to issues around the ownership of knowledge and questions of intellectual property. The larger policy drive towards privatization of education sits all too well with a politics of patenting and copyright within the domain of academic knowledge, in this age of monopoly print-capital. Liang offers a pointed critique of how the circumscription of knowledge as ‘property’ goes against the Kantian idea of the university, as a space of substantive freedom from all forms of control. Taking off from the two landmark judgments of the Delhi High Court in relation to the DU photocopying case, the author goes on to engage with the specific import of ‘fair dealing’ exceptions within copyright law and their interpretive amplitude in favour of an equitable access to knowledge. For societies working with a history of graded dispossessions with regard to social capital, imagining the university as a collegial community of public knowledge is a resolute reclamation of it.
