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Ragavan ‘15, (Srividhya, Author and professor of Law at the University of Oklahoma, College of Law with a focus on intellectual property, trade, and development, “Diversity in intellectual property : identities, interests, and intersections / edited by Irene Calboli, Marquette University Law School and Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore, Srividhya Ragavan, University of Oklahoma College of Law”, Cambridge University Press, October 5th 2015,https://web-p-ebscohost-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook?sid=8f1915dc-52f5-4bd9-a37e-83ac3a3c7bbf%40redis&vid=0&format=EB//ACM!
Copyright protects only original works of an artistic, literary, dramatic, or musical nature. By requiring such classification, the law would seem to demand at least some basic explanation of what is meant by “art,” what sounds constitute “music,” what symbols, when strung together, might be said to amount to “literary” expression. And yet, copyright juris- prudence is replete with the insistence that no such assessment of the substance of a work is required – the determination of whether some- thing is an “artistic work,” we are frequently assured, has nothing to do with the qualitative evaluation of whether something is good art, bad art, or even a “work of art.”1 As Alfred Yen put it, “the general irrelevance
1 See, e.g., George Hensher Ltd. v. Restawhile Upholstery Ltd. [1976] A.C. 64 (H.L.) 78–9 (U.K.) (Lord Reid stating that “it may be misleading to equate artistic craftsmanship
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William Michael Schuster 21, assistant professor at the University of Georgia Terry College of Business with a courtesy appointment at the University of Georgia School of Law, Miriam Marcowitz-Bitton, Professor of Law at Bar-Ilan University, Deborah R. Gerhardt, University of North Carolina School of Law, 2021, “An Empirical Study of Gender and Race in Trademark Prosecution,” University of North Carolina School of Law, (94) pp. #-#, https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1564&context=faculty_publications, eb
With regard to gender, Brauneis and Oliar found that two-thirds of registered authors were male but that this gender gap differs across types of works. 93 Female authors also increased their representation over time.94 Still, the proportion of registered female authors remained at less than the proportion of women in the labor force.95 The fields least dominated by male authors were art and text, while the fields most dominated by men were movies and software.96 The degree to which female authors were increasing in representation varied by type of work97 and was driven mainly by textual works.98
A number of scholars analyze the intersection of copyright law and gender from a feminist perspective, and some conclude that the doctrines and the institutions that apply it have done so in a way that undermines women’s creativity. Professor Shelley Wright conducted an early feminist analysis of copyright law, focusing on two genres that were denigrated despite—or perhaps because of—significant contributions from women: the English novel and needlework.99 She concludes that creative women have been marginalized by ideologies surrounding the artistic process such that women authors and artists are not recognized as creators of “art” but rather of “crafts” and “domestic arts” below the minimum threshold for legal protection.100 Copyright law’s economic and moral rights, by contrast, are more individualistic and patriarchal, such that protected categories of art become “masculinized.”101
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Robbins 03
(Sarah Ruffing, Lorraine Sherley Professor of Literature at TCU, teaches American and feminist lit classes – PhD of English and English Education from Umich (go blue), MA and BA in English from UNC Chappell Hill – received Micahel R. Ferrari Award for Distinquished University Service and Leadership at TCU, “Distributed Authorship: A Feminist Case-Study Framework for Studying Intellectual Property”, College English, Volume 66 No. 2, pp 155-171, https://www-jstor-org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/3594264?searchText=%22feminist%22+%22intellectual+property%22&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3D%2522feminist%2522%2B%2522intellectual%2Bproperty%2522%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A64d60546f8641c2d3c4c16710d502096&seq=9) //GB
Recent, highly productive discussions of intellectual property and authorship in English studies have concentrated on two broad areas of inquiry. Scholars have repeatedly asserted fair use principles to mobilize resistance against the legal trends restricting texts' circulation. At the same time, our growing appreciation of student writing and other marginalized groups' creative acts as forms of authorship has prompted teacher-scholars' calls for recognizing the shared patters terns of ownership often associated with such work. Andrea A. Lunsford and Susan West, of course, set the stage for succeeding discussions in their groundbreaking essay, "Intellectual Property and Composition Studies." Significantly, they identified fied both of the major areas of inquiry that have driven intellectual property work in composition studies since then. On the one hand, they critiqued “the field’s silent complicity in shrinking the intellectual commons" and pointed to challenges from critical theory, the scientific community, and new technology that should promote less modernist views of authorship (387). On the other, they not(like us)ed that “teachers often in effect appropriate the writing of students," unfairly moving to “commodify” and trade in the commercial value of student writing, which legitimates teacherly claims to particular intellectual terrain" (398). Building on the firstpoint, intellectual tual property activists have focused on protecting the rights consumers need to have in order to access and use others' textual products-often as a step toward creating (or authoring) their own “new” texts. As a “flip side” of the intellectual property issues, the emphasis has been on protecting producers who are potentially vulnerable to appropriation and/or misues, in large part because their status as authors is tenuous. So, in both directions, authorship has beeen at the heart of intellectual property discussions.
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Schuster et. al ’21 [William M. Schuster, a professor at UNC studying the correlation between trademark prosecution and gender, Carolina Law Scholarship Repository, “An empirical study of gender and race in trademark prosecution” , Vol 94 page 1416- 1419;2021]
From an international perspective, copyright registries are rare. Because the U.S. Copyright Office has maintained a copyright registry for decades, it provides a potential wealth of information on copyright ownership over time. Unfortunately, unlike USPTO data, the Copyright Office does not share its data in a publicly available bulk format. Despite this challenge, Professors Robert Brauneis and Dotan Oliar performed an extensive empirical study of gender, racial, and age patterns in U.S. copyright registration from 1978 to 2012.84 Their analysis shows interesting differences in both the types of works and registration rates for various groups.85 They found that White authors are substantially overrepresented, accounting for nearly 80% of registrations or 116% of their proportion of the general population.86 Interestingly, Black authors are even more overrepresented, accounting for 14–15% of all registrations,87 or 120% of their proportion of the general U.S. population.88 Latinx authors had the lowest registration rate, accounting for less than 10% of all copyright registrations, a rate only 44.6% of their proportion of the general U.S. population.89 Brauneis and Oliar also found that members of different races and ethnicities differ substantially in the types of work they register.90 For example, White authors predominate in dramatic works and software, while Black authors predominate in music and drama, and Latinx authors predominate in music and movies. Asians and Pacific Islanders were the strongest in art and software and weakest in music and drama,91 while those who identified as Jewish were associated with a high per-capita rate of registrations, mainly of textual works.92 With regard to gender, Brauneis and Oliar found that two-thirds of registered authors were male but that this gender gap differs across types of works. 93 Female authors also increased their representation over time.94 Still, the proportion of registered female authors remained at less than the proportion of women in the labor force.95 The fields least dominated by male authors were art and text, while the fields most dominated by men were movies and software.96 The degree to which female authors were increasing in representation varied by type of work97 and was driven mainly by textual works.98 A number of scholars analyze the intersection of copyright law and gender from a feminist perspective, and some conclude that the doctrines and the institutions that apply it have done so in a way that undermines women’s creativity. Professor Shelley Wright conducted an early feminist analysis of copyright law, focusing on two genres that were denigrated despite—or perhaps because of—significant contributions from women: the English novel and needlework.99 She concludes that creative women have been marginalized by ideologies surrounding the artistic process such that women authors and artists are not recognized as creators of “art” but rather of “crafts” and “domestic arts” below the minimum threshold for legal protection.100 Copyright law’s economic and moral rights, by contrast, are more individualistic and patriarchal, such that protected categories of art become “masculinized.”101 Other legal scholars suggest that copyright tends to exclude female forms of creativity and knowledge.102 Copyright laws thus have an impactupon whether women are treated equally to men in copyright-related contexts.103 Copyright doctrine’s focus on individual author control over works may also interfere with feminist use of collaborative authorship or relational structures104 rather than ensuring dynamic audience participation in the creative process.105 Similarly, copyright law provides lesser protections for derivative works, such as fan fiction and art, that are often produced by and for women.106
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Vats 24 [Anjali, JD, PhD is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law with a secondary appointment in the Communication Department at the University of Pittsburgh. “Chinese and Russian Cybercrime in Global Racial Orders of Intellectual Property”, Feminist Cyberlaw, edited by Meg Leta Jones and Amanda
THE MASCULINE WHITENESS OF RUSSIAN HACKING In 2020, CNN published an article with the headline “37 Times Trump Was Soft on Russia.”68 According to the article, Trump not only urged Russia to hack more, stating: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he also proposed cybercrime cooperation with Putin.69 The NCSC, in contrast to its assessments of China’s economic espionage, describes Russia as a “sophisticated adversary,” focused on military and economic domination.70 While the Chinese threat originates in “persistence,” a trope of mechanistic overrun, the Russian threat originates in “[sophistication],” a trope of elegant wrongdoing. If US policy toward China with respect to intellectual property and economic espionage can be characterized as condescending managerialism, its Russia policy can be described as begrudging acceptance. This hands-off approach has persisted for many years in the face of egregious violations of geopolitical norms, such as invasions of sovereign nations and interference in national elections, as well as a litany of intellectual property and economic espionage transgressions. This is curious given that cybersecurity experts consistently rank Russia in the top cybercrime threats to the US, alongside China. Russian hackers are described as “sowing chaos.”71 China’s mechanistic precision is contrasted with Russia’s thuggish coldbloodedness.72 Yet the consequences for the two nations are very different. Barron’s reports that there are two primary reasons for US nonintervention in the latter issues: that Russia is careful to stay within applicable legal boundaries, here of infringement and cybercrime, and that the United States lacks the political will to enforce its policies. Vladimir Putin himself is aware that “there is little Western countries have been willing to do to stop them . . . If there was little incentive in Russia to stop cybercrime before Ukraine, there is no incentive now.73 Indeed, even when Putin declared, in March 2022, that Russian nationals would no longer be required to pay patent owners in “unfriendly countries,” the US barely responded.74 One of the few comparative studies of US treatment of Chinese and Russian infringement, a decades old essay, states what is now obvious: “In general, the United States has appeared to pursue different political, economic, and military goals in its relationships with Russia and China.”75 In practice, this means that the US has punished China for even those infractions that may fall under the gray areas of international law while permitting Russia to engage in similar acts with little more than a slap on the wrist.76 The carte blanche that the United States has offered to Russia is entangled with white supremacy. While the end of the Cold War produced détente with the US in the 1990s and 2000s, Putin’s rise to power shifted the dynamic of the bilateral relationship.77 The latter has been described as a “strongman,” a term “historically deployed to describe autocrats who rule by violence and see themselves, or want to be seen, as worthy of fear.”78 Over the past twenty years, Putin has led an increasingly aggressive Russia, invested in transnational white supremacy. Indeed, multiple white nationalist leaders, including David Duke and Richard Spencer, have identified Putin’s Russia as central to maintaining the global authority of whiteness.79 Yet despite warnings about the destabilizing effects of Russia’s white nationalism, the United States has declined to consistently condemn it.80 I posit that this is largely because Russia, a “contingently white” country, has strategically exploited its whiteness in its geopolitical dealings.81 The concept of contingent whiteness presupposes that race is produced through racialization, a process of constant change that explains “why certain groups become accepted as ‘white,’ how and why they adopt white identity claims, and what consequences those identity claims have for social relations.”82 Russia has endeavored to become whiter over time and Euroamerican nations have largely accepted this. Ian Law writes that “there have been striking changes in racial ideas, practices, exclusions and violence in Russia since the 1990s . . . the notion of a ‘civilised country’ has become a synonym for racial whiteness and Russianness a form of privileged whiteness.”83 Marina Levina observes that Russian investments in whiteness are used to reinforce what Jasbir Puar calls a “politics of debilitation”84 on racially othered peoples such as Syrians and Ukrainians.85 Russians choose whiteness because they benefit from its privileges, including relative impunity. The United States allows this because it benefits from Russia’s whiteness, including regional counterbalancing. Despite its chosen and bestowed whiteness, Russia has retained its long-standing identity as a political foil and imperial actor that requires containment. This is evident in multiple areas of friction with the United States, including discussions over NATO expansion. Conflict over intellectual property and economic espionage extends at least as far back to the Soviet Era when, as Debora Halbert observes, national intellectual, political, and economic investments functioned as tools for proving cultural and artistic superiority.86 Yet the contemporary American refusal to hold Russia accountable for its misdeeds suggests that the ideological dispute is embedded within a larger context. I propose that, while Russians continue to operate as “bad whites”87 against whom Americans can demonstrate their global moral authority via soft power, it is also beneficial for the United States to engage in performative admonishments instead of meaningful consequences. Three racial outcomes flow from the toothless US response to Russia: (1) it normalizes the US position as the heroic “good white”88 who appears to seek justice in the global arena; (2) it allows the United States to chastise Russia while also simultaneously colluding with Putin; and (3) it positions China below Russia in a divide-and-conquer style intellectual property and economic espionage racial order. US intellectual property rights talk with Russia thus supports larger architectures of white supremacy by letting the former off the hook while simultaneously deriding China for its illegal and illicit acts. It also exemplifies how realpolitik itself is constituted relationally, through categories of race and gender. Returning to EEA data with this context around Russia illustrates how the United States uses intellectual property rights talk to reinforce Sinophobic racial hierarchies through relational racialization. The Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions notes that “Chinese-named defendants were 13.2% more likely to have their [EEA] cases dismissed or acquitted compared to other defendants, and 13.5% less likely to be found guilty of EEA-related charges than defendants with nonChinese names.”89 In terms of sentencing, “Chinese-named defendants on average received 12.5 months longer jail terms compared to all other defendants and 12.4 months longer jail terms compared to defendants with Western names.90 The targeting of Chinese defendants relative to other defendants is even more stark when considered over time. The number of Western defendants has declined from 59 percent of the total of all defendants in 1996–2008 to 28 percent of the total defendants in 2016–2020.91 In comparison, approximately 50 percent of the total defendants prosecuted since 2009 have been Chinese.92 These numbers are particularly notable given that Russian actors are growing increasingly bold. “US intelligence officials do not . . . rate China as the biggest threat to the US in cyberspace. The Russians are definitely better, almost as good as we are,’ said one,” Richard Clarke and Robert Knake reported in 2010.93 The Obama Administration and Biden Administration both imposed sanctions against Russia for engaging in economic espionage via cybercrime.94 However, those sanctions were narrow and limited, especially compared to those imposed upon China.95 The racialized rhetorics that American policymakers use to talk about Russia provide some insight about why the US shows this geopolitical rival such deference. A 2009 report released by the Rand Corporation describes Russia as a literal host and harbor for cybercrime, emphasizing that infringers use Russian websites to sell pirated and counterfeited goods because they operate as “protected spaces for crime to arise.”96 Instead of being intertwined with narratives of threatening criminality like Black mafia rhetorics,97 or narratives of devious yellow perils like Asian mafia rhetorics,98 Russian mafia rhetorics suggest a worthy, masculine, strongman foe. Russian hackers are managers of the infringement world, whose ingenuity and infrastructure helps exceptional fakes to circulate. In 2008, Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey declared: “A Russian mobster selling fake handbags through a middleman in New York may also be selling pirated DVDs in London, counterfeit AIDS medication in Africa, and child pornography over the internet.”99 The “Russian mobster” is the protagonist of the story, here because he manages the sale of multiple goods. In 2006, the Los Angeles Times proclaimed, in an article entitled “Russians Able to Fake It Like No One Else,” that “if there is a world capital of audacious fabrication, it must be Moscow, where fake is never a four-letter word.”100 It went on to describe Russian copies through “the French notion of faire montrer [sic],” noting “it’s better to look like something than to be something. It’s a very Eastern way of thinking.”101 Fakes may be Eastern, but Russian fakes are exceptional, certainly better than those Made in China. This racialized rhetoric of expertise positions Russia as strong and China as weak. Invoking France moves Russia closer to Europe—and whiteness.102
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Vats 24 [Anjali, JD, PhD is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law with a secondary appointment in the Communication Department at the University of Pittsburgh. “Chinese and Russian Cybercrime in Global Racial Orders of Intellectual Property”, Feminist Cyberlaw, edited by Meg Leta Jones and Amanda Levandowski, May 2024, pp 80-83] //Wu吳
THE FEMINIZED ASIANNESS OF CHINESE CYBERCRIME In a recent article for the South China Morning Post, Leo Yu observed that ongoing Congressional investigations into Tik Tok as spying technology are rooted not in fact but in the “original sin” of Chinese ownership.34 During the hearings, Republican Jay Obernolte asked accusatorily: “How could looking at the algorithm confirm that [Tik Tok is] free from foreign influence?”35 while confrontationally informing CEO Shou Zi Chew “you are not trusted here.”36 Reasonable people may disagree about the nature and scope of the privacy issues associated with Tik Tok but the evidence that Chinese-owned companies are held to higher and racialized standards than white-owned ones is difficult to deny. A bipartisan majority of US policymakers appear committed to the narrative of China as a nation of disloyal spies, who mobilize new technologies in the service of global political and economic domination. Their prejudices are evident in the long history of actions intended to rein in Chinese trade secret theft that the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC), among other US government agencies, has characterized as “active and persistent.”37 While the NCSC’s conclusion has its kernel of truth, the assumptions upon which it is based are troubling and hypocritical. Multiple independent analyses of the China Initiative characterize it as a racist policy that targeted Chinese researchers for “relatively minor errors and omissions in grant applications, rather than spies stealing national security secrets or proprietary technology at the direction of the Chinese government.”38 A recent Brennan Center report historicizes the program, observing that “the FBI and Justice Department tendency to stretch facts and jump to conclusions in Chinese espionage cases pre-dated the China Initiative.”39 For instance, FBI counterintelligence training materials otherize those of Asian descent.40 And earlier policies and actions, including the Economic Espionage Act of 1996 (EEA), reflect similar racial animus. The EEA, which turned theft of trade secrets into a federal crime,41 marked an uptick in criminalizing previously accepted forms of competitive behavior, with an eye to Asia.42 In 2022, the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions noted that “[a] significant increase in the number of cases charging EEA-related offenses against suspects of Chinese heritage began in 2009 under the Obama administration.”43 The report goes on to propose that this is a symptom of disproportionate and racist targeting of Chinese people.44 In a detailed review of the EEA, Andrew Chongseh Kim finds “significant disparities in the rates at which people of Asian descent are prosecuted for espionage and the outcomes of those prosecutions.”45 He concludes that “Chinese and other Asian defendants are twice as likely to be innocent as those of other races.”46 This, of course, reinforces Del Visco’s argument, that Sinophobic logics are reflexive in American political culture, including among Democrats.47 CRT scholars and activists have long argued that “yellow peril” and “model minority” stereotypes organize American thinking about Asianness.48 Within this binary, East Asians are presented as dangerous and disloyal “forever foreigners,” who threaten to overrun the nation.49 All too often, Asianness is also feminized, for instance through the association of spying with gossip and the association of disloyalty with weakness.50 Such gendered tropes are evident in representations of the Chinese government as an all-powerful regime and Chinese citizens as eternally committed ideologues. Consider, for instance, the FBI’s semi-fictional propaganda film, The Company Man (2015), which promotes yellow perilism by telling a story that contrasts a loyal American businessman with two disloyal Chinese cybercriminals in search of trade secrets. Circulated as a both an agency training video and public awareness campaign, The Company Man encourages multiple audiences to embrace American exceptionalism and Sinophobic paranoia.51 The film tells a gendered, as well as raced, tale in which the dishonorable Chinese men, who shamelessly sneak around industrial spaces and offer exorbitant bribes, fail to live up to the honorable white masculinity of their American target.52 As evident in the short film, representations of yellow perils and forever foreigners often feminize and emasculate East Asians,53 representing them as obedient and cowardly automatons, dishonestly and submissively slinking through the shadows while sabotaging others and destroying relationships.54 Techno-Orientalism, Betsy Huang argues, emerged in the 1880s with descriptions of Asians as mechanistic alien bots without emotions.55 In a longer history of the Asian as “model machine,” a feminized robotic model of race, Long Bui highlights the many ways that US public culture consistently expresses ambivalence, specifically hate and reverence, about Asian technological prowess.56 Though most often applied in science fiction studies, the term techno-Orientalism is useful in theorizing political rhetoric as well, specifically in highlighting how US trade, innovation, internet, and technology policy has collided with racial and gender anxieties. As Lok Sui and Claire Chun put it, “techno-orientalism . . . is the expressive vehicle . . . by which Western and Eastern nations articulate their fears, desires, and anxieties that are produced in their competitive struggle to gain technological hegemony through economic trade and scientific innovation.”57 They trace the concept of techno-Orientalism, through the work of David Morely and Kevin Robin, back to fears of Japanese technological superiority in the 1980s.58 These fears played out in the VCR Wars, a series of conflicts over Asian production of video recording technologies that became lightning rods for national security and economic downturn rhetoric.59 With respect to the former, the Supreme Court, in a decision that largely sidestepped the race and gender anxieties of the moment, held that the production and use of Betamax recorders did not constitute copyright infringement, only “time shifting” of programming that viewers could watch at the originally scheduled time.60 Still techno-Orientalism continued to rear its head, first in disputes over semiconductors and automobiles and later in disputes over cybercrime and platforms. Despite the Supreme Court’s decision, Motion Picture Association of America president Jack Valenti doubled down on the Japanophobic sentiments of the time. In 1982, he testified before Congress, at a hearing on home recording: “The single one American-made product that the Japanese, skilled beyond all comparison in their conquest of world trade, are unable to duplicate or displace or to compete with or to clone . . . this asset, [the US film and television production industry], which is unlike steel or silicon chips or motor cars or electronics of all kinds—a piece of sardonic irony that while the Japanese are unable to duplicate the American films by flank assault, they can destroy it by this video cassette recorder.”61 This eerily familiar language expresses ambivalence about Japan, a nation “skilled beyond all comparison in the conquest of world trade,” but nonetheless incapable of competing with America’s creative moviemaking spirit. Technology operates as a tool of conquest in Valenti’s analogy, as well as an anchor for racist and sexist intellectual property rights talk. War metaphors such as “flank assault” add a militant and patriotic urgency to the fight, with Japan engaging in feminized treachery and pathologized virality. Perhaps more importantly, they transform intellectual property rights talk into a raced and gendered conversation that disparages Japanese peoples’ ability to produce artistic works and engage in war. The backhanded compliment that implicitly broadens copyright to include economic espionage, is discrimination deployed in the service of ownership rights. The Japanophobia of the 1980s is intertwined with contemporary Sinophobia because, as Stanford Lyman puts it, anti-Asian racisms are overlapping and interchangeable, despite cultural and geopolitical differences: “The yellow peril appeared first as China, then as Japan, then as China and North Korea, then as China and Vietnam, then briefly as a temporarily prosperous Japan again, and, at the moment—once again as China.”62 Moreover, both are orientalist in their demonization of the so-called Orient as a means of validating Euroamerican white supremacy and legal regimes. Over time, the yellow peril narrative of the “Chinese copy” came to be treated as bipartisan fact, with the Bush Administration and the Clinton Administration cracking down on infringement, while bashing China’s intellectual property policies. Under the Obama Administration, Biden declared: “Why have they not become [one of] the most innovative countries in the world? Why is there a need to steal our intellectual property? Why is there a need to have a business hand over its trade secrets to have access to a market of a billion, three hundred million people? Because they’re not innovating.”63 This racist and gendered intellectual property rights talk is perpetually justified through moving goalposts: when China agrees to international norms, the US demands greater compliance with its visions of knowledge ownership and economic norms.64 Copying is treated as weakness not as resilience or choice. America consistently shores up support for white supremacist intellectual property policies, including around trade secrets, through the mobilization of public emotions of fear and anger. These feelings are frequently rooted in national and geopolitical anxieties about the sustainability of the economy and whiteness.65 But, as Sara Ahmed might contend, these “racial feelings” about employment, resources, and more are dishonest projections, defensive postures that ignore how the United States built its own economy on infringement and imposes double standards on other nations.66 Indeed, good faith international intellectual property engagements require acknowledging the unique knowledge production trajectories and economic flows of nations in the Global South.67 Yet according to US racial epistemes, Chinese people are quintessential bad intellectual property citizens who constitutionally refuse to comply with global norms, and Euroamerican nations are quintessentially good intellectual property citizens who intuitively steward international norms. These heroic myths of whiteness and masculinity are further normalized through relational racialization.
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Buranen and Roy ’99 (Lise and Alice M., Faculty Director of the University Writing Center, and a retired Professor of English and Linguistics at California State University at Los Angeles, ‘Perspectives on plagiarism and intellectual property in a postmodern world”, Albany : State University of New York Press, April 23 1999, https://search.lib.umich.edu/catalog/record/990040340600106381?query=Perspectives+on+Plagiarism+and+Intellectual+Property+in+a+Postmodern+World//ACM!
For these and no doubt many other reasons, only recently have teachers and theorists of writing begun to excavate the deeply repressed and unspoken formalist, positivist, and individualist ideological assumptions underlying the seemingly simple need for exclusionary ownership of intellectual property. But that work is now underway in composition studies, in work on theory, on history, and on practice. In terms of theories of rhetoric and composition, the work of Susan West comes most immediately to mind. In a commanding dissertation study completed last year ("From Owning to Owning Up: Authorial Rights and Rhetorical Responsibilities"), West explores the construction of
EBSCOhost - printed on 7/16/2024 7:53 PM via UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
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Karell ’05 (Linda, Ph.D. from University of Rochester, Professor for Montana State University and expert researcher, “The postmodern author on stage: Fair Use and Wallace Stegner”, Cincinnati, Ohio: American Drama Institute, June 22 2005, https://search.lib.umich.edu/articles/record/cdi_proquest_miscellaneous_1035716901?query=The+postmodern+author+on+stage//ACM!
One of the central discoveries postmodernism has made is to our understanding of representation. Traditionally, representation assumes an original; it takes as a given that what is being represented has an original, and that recourse to that original proves both the truth of it as original and the accuracy of its representation. Intellectual property laws, which largely came into effect in the 18th and 19th centuries with the printing press and the growing (international) market for literary productions, responded to this traditional understanding of representation. Any copies--representations--of the original must acknowledge their creator because that original is understood as having its genesis in the unique creativity of the author. Much of our unexamined belief in the author as a uniquely creative, inspired individual genius also solidified during this time. (3) Postmodern theories of authorship challenge the belief in the inspired, individual author. Language in particular has been a focus for this challenge. Postmodernism deconstructs the dualism of original/copy, positing instead a web of representations that echo and build upon prior representations, which likewise are indebted to still prior representations, and are prevented by their very nature as language from ever leading back to the original. At its boldest, postmodernism argues that there are no originals; all acts of language, and thus of representation, carry traces of past contexts that inflect their present meanings. The implications for authorship are dramatic.
Foucault's famous claim, that our traditional reverence for the author is the mechanism by which we throw up the gates and bar the door against the endlessly proliferating meanings of the text is, by now, both old hat and blithely disregarded:
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Foster 11 [(Laura Foster, Associate professor at Indiana University Bloomington with a Ph.D. in Women’s Studies from University of California) “Situating Feminism Patent Law and The Public Domain, Colombia Journal of Gender and Law Volume 20 Number 1, Pages 311-313, Jan 1 2011” https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/cjgl/article/view/2614] hwkm
Intellectual property rights are meant to encourage and stimulate creativity and innovation.176 Yet, not all forms of creativity are considered valuable enough to be worth promoting. Creativity that is considered new, novel, and industrial is what is prized. More “traditional” forms of gendered and indigenous labor such as cooking, making clothing, and producing indigenous plant medicines do not count as new, novel, and industrial. Thus, these forms of creativity are deemed less valuable and remain in the public domain. Mechanisms of globalization in fact depend upon the location of gendered and indigenous forms of creativity within the public domain. It ensures that access to indigenous knowledge and resources remains open for appropriation and possible commercialization by others. It also ensures that gendered forms of creativity related to homemaking also remain devalued, thus reinforcing discourses of feminization that contribute to keeping labor costs low.
Scholars in this section envision egalitarian public domains where gendered social relations are taken into account. Women’s relationship to patent law is problematized through recognizing the individual and structural systems of subordination that shape their lives. Critique is leveled against patent law as resulting in unfair practices against women. What emerges are egalitarian public domains where patterns of discrimination are taken into account. This is where the public sphere meets the public domain. Feminist theorizing of the public sphere and its exclusion of female labor becomes a useful tool for examining conceptions of the public domain. Better understandings of the public domain come into view and what emerges is a sense of how certain forms of creativity are included in the public domain (and hence unprotected) in inequitable, discriminatory ways that bring fewer benefits to marginalized groups. A desire for egalitarian public domains therefore emerges, and relations of power are considered. The public domain and its inclusion of certain forms of creativity over others are critically taken into account. Different values of egalitarianism, however, emerge. Equality for some women might mean a reduction of the public domain and expansion of patent law to include more women’s scientific work. Yet, equality for others might entail an expansion of the public domain and limitation of patent law to protect the creative work of women who do not desire to become IP owners. Visions of egalitarian public domains therefore differ from the other conceptions of the public domain discussed thus far.
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Burk 07 [Dan L. earned his Juris Doctor from ASU Law in 1990 and went on to become a leading intellectual property law scholar, renowned across the country. He was a founding faculty member at The University of California, Irvine School of Law, and was instrumental in its development and success. 2007, Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law, Volume 15, Issue 2, Article 4, “Symposium: Feminism and Dualism in Intellectual Property”] //Wu吳
The repeated occurrence of these dualistic themes in intellectual property law suggests a broad variety of implications incident to the structure of such dualism. The exploration and critique of mind/body dualism has a long and voluminous history in Western philosophy, and many of the insights generated by this centuries-old debate might be profitably applied to an analysis of intellectual property law. A full discussion of all, or even a few, of these insights lies far beyond the scope of this essay. Instead, I shall focus on one particular, relatively recent theme in the mind/body discussion arising out of the feminist critique of dualistic paradigms. Feminists have explored the tendency of Western philosophy and practice to divide subjects into oppositional categories including not only masculine/feminine, but also mind/body, nature/culture, public/private, active/passive, reason/emotion, subject/object.39 In each of these dichotomous pairings, the former is typically, if sometimes implicitly, regarded as superior and masculinized, and the latter considered inferior and feminized.40 Feminist commentators have suggested that such designations allow the feminized categories to be branded as “other,” as conditionally flawed or undesirable.41 The elevation of “mind” and “spirit” over “body” and “matter” have been particularly identified with social predominance of reason and objectivity, which are in turn tied to a masculinized framing of other subordinated categories of gender, race, and class.42 Thus, in his Politics, Aristotle justifies the practice of slavery by arguing that: just as the mind or spirit is superior and should rule the body; just as men as a gender are by nature rational and therefore superior, and should properly rule over women; just as humans are by nature rational and therefore superior to animals, and should rule over them, by the same logic, some classes or races who are more rational should properly rule over other races, who should properly be slaves.43 Dualism thus sets the stage for the supposedly inferior, feminized category to be given a status that allows domination and exploitation by members of the privileged category; it is a social and rhetorical strategy that “naturalizes domination.”44 Although the modern reader is likely to find nearly every step of Aristotle’s slavery syllogism to be repugnant, feminist commentators have argued that its premises of superiority are deeply embedded in the fabric of Western culture.45 While those premises may no longer explicitly justify slavery, they may continue to animate attitudes or cultural legacies of inequality. Social practices or disciplines that valorize rationality may be particularly suspect, given the longstanding conceptual linkages between reason and canons of subordination. For example, Aristotle’s complex of oppressive associations may be foundational to Western notions of science, technology, and progress.46 This critique of dualism closely relates to the important theme of “invisible work” that has also been discussed by a range of feminist commentators.47 Owing much of their analysis to Marxist critiques, this literature observes that the bifurcation of social roles into masculine and feminine, and into public and private, obscures and subordinates certain social roles, relegating certain types of work to the private sphere, and so to the realm of “feminine” labor.48 Much of this work is domestic and menial and goes largely unrecognized, even though it is essential to the day-to-day operation of families, firms, and other social institutions. Such work, often performed by women, tends to be low-pay, or in the case of household labor, entirely unpaid. Thus, a great deal of labor that supplies the basic needs of society goes unseen and unrewarded, leading feminist commentators to remark upon the systematic disparity in categories of occupation. This in turn has led them to identify and analyze the gendered nature of recognition for labor.49 The same patterns recognized in domestic and menial labor appear to hold true in our system for rewarding innovation and creativity. As described above, copyright and patent law elevate mental effort over physical effort, conceptual production over material production, thus tying ownership and economic rewards to participation in an idealized, romantic vision of creative production. Participants in the messier, corporeal, material development or execution portions of the creative process are excluded, invisible, unrecognized. This version of creative effort effectively vests ownership in a single or limited number of participants, attributing the entirety of creative production to a particular, discrete act of creative vision. But the production of creative works does not occur in splendid isolation—certainly such is not the case in modern production of copyrighted works, if indeed it ever was. Creative works are instead the result of an extended system of production. This is true not only with regard to the intangible work itself, which postmodern critiques have shown typically arises out of the creative input of many contributors and within a social matrix of previously generated cultural objects,50 but also with regard to the actual physical production of copies, which requires extended support and collaboration from a network of contributors. Such extended collaboration is perhaps most starkly obvious to us as the extensive credits of a motion picture roll by, typically after the end of the show when everyone has left the theater, briefly acknowledging the involvement of the gaffer, the best boy, the key grip, the prop and wardrobe workers, and typically the hundreds of other motion picture production participants. The contributions of such individuals are recognized for a few seconds at the end of the film, but not in the reward system of copyright law. A considerable body of case law emphasizes that the efforts of camera operators or creative consultants who arrange the action for filming do not rise to the level of authorship recognized under the copyright system.51 Neither is this situation unique to the motion picture industry. The pervasive involvement of unrecognized contributors is likely the rule in copyright rather than the exception; industries dominated by copyrighted works are rife with legions of studio musicians, editors, sound engineers, stage hands, lighting technicians, and “ghost” writers without whom there would be no creative works, but who remain quite invisible to the copyright definitions of “originality” and “authorship.”52 Similarly, new inventions are not produced in heroic isolation; postmodern critics are surely correct that the inventor is just as dependent on the milieu of creation and the incremental contributions of previous researchers as is the not-so-romantic author.53 But setting aside for the moment those general foundations of shared knowledge upon which innovation is built, much of inventive activity, and perhaps the majority of inventive research, occurs in collaborative groups. Modern research programs depend upon a host of laboratory technicians, research assistants, process engineers, machinists, drafters, interns, graduate students, and materials specialists who may well have direct, hands-on contact with the building and testing of the invention—not to mention the secretaries, janitors, bottle washers, supply clerks, librarians, and even patent attorneys who indirectly support the development of the invention. These “mere artisans” are not the “heroes” of the inventive process, and their contributions to the embodiment of the inventor’s ideas will tend to go unrecognized. They do not contribute to the idealized “conception” of the invention, and so their involvement is, so far as patent law is concerned, quite invisible. As in other areas where feminist commentators have identified attitudes and practices designating some work as socially invisible, the legal bifurcation of creativity into oppositional mental and physical efforts shunts reputation and reward to a relatively small but privileged portion of the creative process.54 By excluding from consideration creative contributions related to the physical instantiation of creative works, intellectual property law excludes particular classes of contributors from recognition and ownership. Those excluded constitute not only a class of unrecognized contributors to the creative process for purposes of copyright and patent law, but frequently are those in positions of lower status and pay, and in many cases may be predominantly female. Thus, intellectual property dualism appears to reinforce socially established structures of hierarchy within creative endeavor and to allow certain valorized contributors to dominate the creative process so as to reap the rewards bestowed under the copyright and patent statutes.
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Rayvon Fouché 11, Rayvon Fouché is Associate Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies and Director of American Studies at Purdue University, Sharra Vostral, Sharra Louise Vostral is a Professor of History and Science and Technology at the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University, 2011, ““Selling” Women: Lillian Gilbreth, Gender Translation, and Intellectual Property,” Journal of Gender Social Policy and Law, (19(3)), pp. 825-850, https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1524&context=jgspl, eb
The processes of intellectual property production during the early twentieth century seem very simple. Without the realm of the digital and genetic, the path to obtaining intellectual property rights appears more straightforward. Yet, during the early twentieth century, some of the same issues of translating social and cultural knowledge into readable scientific data by technical communities inside and outside of corporate organizations existed. In this Article, we will return to the early twentieth century to examine this type of translation. Translation, or the process of converting information from one form or medium into another, is the central focus of this Article. In this case, it is the translation of privately understood, but publicly unspoken, social and cultural knowledge about women‘s bodies into data points that can be integrated into patentable artifacts. We view the translator as the fulcrum upon which social and cultural knowledge is integrated into intellectual property. Often, this translator ends up being an individual. In the context of women‘s hygiene practices, one such translator was Lillian Gilbreth.
<<<shrunken for readability>>>
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Debora Halbert 06, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawai`i at Manoa, 2006, “Feminist Interpretations of Intellectual Property,” Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law, (14(3))pp. 273, https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1264&context=jgspl, eb
I. FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE In this section,
I seek to map the ways feminist theorists have approached cultural production and developed a feminist epistemology. Intellectual property scholarship and feminist epistemologies have proceeded upon parallel but unconnected tracks. Feminist scholars rarely, if ever, mention the words copyright, patent, or intellectual property; intellectual property scholars rarely, if ever, appeal to feminist interpretations to better understand the law.10 However, while the words copyright and patent do not appear in the feminist literature, the ideas underlying these legal regimes are evident when feminists talk about the production of culture as male dominated, about how women have been excluded from creative work or have had their work appropriated by men, and about a feminist epistemology.11 Thus, by investigating the ways feminists theorize about the construction of knowledge, new insights into how intellectual property law has been developed upon gendered assumptions may become apparent. These feminist theorists are typically not read with the idea of intellectual property in mind, but the connections between the two are clear. While feminist theorists will be familiar with these thinkers, intellectual property scholars may not be, and I have chosen to outline the feminist arguments at length to make the links between both types of scholarship clear.
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Swanson ’15 [Kara W. Swanson, Professor of law and affiliate law of history at Northeastern University; The American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law; “Intellectual Property and gender: Reflections on accomplishments and methodology”; https://www.proquest.com/docview/1788568402/abstract/BC9BA01FA3F343D5PQ/14?accountid=14667&sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals; Vol. 24, Issue 1, page 183-186 12/4/2015]
As a historian of women, technology, and science, I have sometimes made the mistake of thinking of gender disparity in participation in IP systems as old news, noticed and discussed for over a century.33 But what is important and significant, and explored in past symposia, is the extent to which such disparate participation is not merely the stuff of history, but rather current reality. In the early twenty-first century, women are receiving fewer than 11% of patents issued in the United States.34 That is not just a disparity, it is a chasm. Further, research shows that female scientists patent less often than male scientists, even in areas of science where there is near-gender parity in personnel (bioscience) and when researchers attempt to control for other possible causative variables, such as age and institutional affiliation.35 As Dan Burk has been considering, this situation cries out for rectification. Is there something within the patent system itself, in addition to the well-known barriers to women's participation in science, engineering, and technology that is limiting women's participation? Burk is exploring possible "levers" within the patent system that might be pulled to improve female participation.36
What also becomes apparent when one considers the data about women and patenting is that we lack such data, historical or present-day, for women and the copyright system or the trademark system. We know something about the percentage of women executives in copyright-intensive industries,37 and we know, thanks to participants in this symposia and those who built on their work, something about how copyright tends to exclude traditionally female forms of knowledge and creativity,38 but what can we say about copyright registration, copyright infringement claims, and the rate of trademark registration by women-owned businesses?39 This is not old news, but news yet to be gathered.
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Karell ’05 (Linda, Ph.D. from University of Rochester, Professor for Montana State University and expert researcher, “The postmodern author on stage: Fair Use and Wallace Stegner”, Cincinnati, Ohio: American Drama Institute, June 22 2005, https://search.lib.umich.edu/articles/record/cdi_proquest_miscellaneous_1035716901?query=The+postmodern+author+on+stage//ACM!
In numerous interviews, when asked about the composition process of Angle of Repose, Stegner makes virtually identical arguments that insist on creative license: "I used her as a model, but whenever her papers didn't suit me, I changed them, which is why it is a novel and not a biography. If I'd been writing her biography, I couldn't have changed them" (Hepworth 36). Yet, Stegner's view of history as implicitly a man's province suggests why he chose a fictional format for his use of Foote's life. Stegner says that, after reading Foote's letters to Helena Gilder,
I decided, quite frankly, that she wasn't worth a
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Fassbinder, Nocella, and Kahn ’12 (Samuel Day, Anthony J., and Richard, authors for University Chicago and DeVry University, Hamline University, Antioch University, “Greening the Academy : Ecopedagogy Through the Liberal Arts”, BRILL, January 1 2012,https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/lib/umichigan/detail.action?docID=3034774//ACM!
Today, we misperceive environmental studies as largely based in the physical sciences, with Ethnic Studies or Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies as largely based in the social sciences. Feminist research and activism in a variety of fields corrects these misperceptions. In the field of feminist science studies, for example, scholars such as Evelyn Fox Keller, Sandra Harding, Lynda Birke, and Ruth Hubbard have challenged the androcentric construction of knowledge, the separation between researcher and subject, and the invisibly racialized qualities of scientific research. Their scholarship has provided theoretical groundwork for the women’s health movement, and the related movements for public health and environmental justice. Feminist environmental scholar-activists have generated a wealth of knowledge across the curriculum, contributing to and transforming the fields of philosophy, geography, political science, economics, literary studies, as well as in gender, sexuality, and women’s studies. Beyond the academy, feminist environmentalists are active internationally, through the climate justice movement, the anti-corporateglobalization movement, and movements to promote fair trade, food security, water sovereignty, gender justice and environmental health.
Some feminist environmentalists identify themselves as ecofeminists, others see themselves as environmental justice activists, and still others self-identify as simply environmentalists or labor activists. Not surprisingly, given the persistence of sexism, racism, and other forms of hierarchical thought and institutionalized power, the intersectional work of feminist environmentalists has faced resistance across the disciplines, in their home communities and in the larger political arena as well. It’s well known that prior to winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, Kenya’s Green Belt Movement founder Wangari Maathai was persecuted and even beaten for her work, whipped about the head, and jailed, all for speaking out for democracy, organizing women and planting trees: the assaults came from men who felt Maathai was acting out of line from women’s assigned role. Anti-nuclear activists still remember Karen Silkwood, who spoke out against unsafe workplace conditions at Kerr- McGee’s plutonium processing plant in Oklahoma and was harshly punished for her whistleblowing: Silkwood was mysteriously contaminated with high levels of radioactivity found in her lungs and in her home; on her way to a meeting with an Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers’ union official and a New York Times reporter, where Silkwood planned to deliver a stack of documentation for her claims, she allegedly fell asleep at the wheel and drove off the road to her death—her car showing signs of being rammed from behind, and the highway behind her car marked with tire skids.
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Ogunleye 22 [(Ife Ogunleye, Research Fellow at Progress Chamber) “The SHOP SAFE Act Would Hurt These 10 Small Online Sellers — But Help Louis Vuitton, The Medium, Feb 3 2022” https://medium.com/chamber-of-progress/the-shop-safe-act-would-hurt-these-10-small-online-sellers-but-help-louis-vuitton-83a0d146c17f] hwkm
Almost half of consumers’ online shopping happened on digital marketplaces like eBay and Etsy in 2021, with more than 95% of shoppers using an online marketplace in the last year. And marketplaces have been a boon to sellers too; more than 2.5 million artisans sell their products through Etsy, more than 80% of whom are women.
Given the importance of online marketplaces to the economy, it seems a strange time to make it harder to be an online entrepreneur. But what’s what the SHOP SAFE Act — which was recently attached to a broader bill before the U.S. House — would do.
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Inés Binder Alexandra Haché 2023 “A FEMINIST CONVERSATION ON CYBERSECURITY” Comunicadora social. Investiga sobre feminismo, tecnologías y políticas de comunicación. Es cofundadora del Centro de Producciones Radiofónicas (CPR) y forma parte del espacio hackfeminista la bekka. Autora de Por un ciberfeminismo radiofónico. Alexandra Haché is a cyberfeminist and researcher. She co-founded the Donestech collective, which explores the intersection of gender and technology, and is currently implementing FemBloc a feminist helpline for people facing gender-based violence online. //stobo
Since the late 1960s, as the development of telecommunications and microprocessors with a greater capacity to produce, store, transmit and process data expanded, the challenges and areas of social concern also grew. Three decades later, it was believed that technology would allow everybody to participate in the global economy leading to development. However, networks questioned this core assumption of the neoliberal agenda. They began to advocate gender mainstreaming in global communications policy to address structural inequalities shaping women's participation in the Information Society. The first challenge was to create space for policy discussions where communication and technology issues have historically been seen as purely technical and of interest only to policymakers, businesses and industry. On the other hand, civil society and non-profit actors were not even considered in the debates. Feminists, however, proposed a different approach: they criticised patriarchal society and neoliberal globalisation, the concentration of media ownership and the commodification of communication, the unequal access to telecommunications infrastructure, and the international division of labour and employment in the media, telecommunications and information technologies sectors. They highlighted barriers to access to relevant information and its effective use, gender-based violence at every stage of ICT development, and structural barriers to women's participation in technical careers and knowledge production. And they also fought for a place in decision-making structures designing global communication policies. Most of these challenges remain relevant today and have further extended to new fields, such as cybersecurity, developed under the influence of national security debates with a strong military tradition. In the mainstream understanding of the cybersecurity debates, States are responsible for "restoring control over the misuse of cyber technologies through a more coordinated and focused effort from the national and international society." Many problematic notions come into play in this approach. If we do not focus on analysing the conditions of production of cyber technologies, we might think that cybersecurity challenges are simply a matter of "misuse" that can be "corrected" later with some adjustments and agreements between "interested parties". To contribute to this debate, APC developed the Framework for developing a gender-responsive cybersecurity policy to provide policy-making actors with a set of tools to mainstream gender in cybersecurity policies. This approach forces us to examine the foundations of cybersecurity policies. Principles, as central as the idea of safety, are not universal. On the contrary, they are "constantly sustained and elaborated by local socio-cultural practices that characterise who and what is considered "safe" or "unsafe". In this edition of GenderIT, we want to focus on the human dimension of cybersecurity. To do this, we asked ourselves how cybersecurity policies developed from the centres of political, economic and epistemological power affect those at the margins; and how we can think about cybersecurity from a feminist perspective. We set out to find specific and contextualised examples of how cybersecurity directly affects the lives of different women, LGBTQIA+ people and diverse social groups around the world. Totalitarian governments are instrumentalising cybersecurity policies to increase crackdown on dissent and shrinking civil society space. The persecution of anonymity online under the guise of combating fake news and smear campaigns has become commonplace.
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Brantly and Oliver ’21 [Amy T. Brantly is a founding partner at Kesselman Brantly Stockinger LLP specializing in antitrust and business litigation, Jennifer M. Oliver is a partner at MoginRubin LLP where she specializes in antitrust litigation, merger control work, and private litigation, Califronia Lawyers Association, “Antitrust and Unfair Competition Law”, , Vol 31, No 1, Page 115-115]
America’s monopolies, duopolies and oligopolies, and its citizens’ increasing reliance on their services, are drawing scrutiny at levels unseen for more than a century. Like industrial concentration, gender inequality, and especially economic inequality, is similarly a well-known cause of increasing concern in this country.
Parallels can be drawn between gender inequality and behavior from America’s dominant firms. Gender and competition policy are inextricably intertwined; persistent unjust discrimination in a concentrated market may be a by-product of market power. Dominant firms exclude new entrants from a market, whereas gender inequity and biases exclude women from full participation in the economy and workplace. Gender inequity and biases can deprive firms of the benefits of women’s diverse experiences and viewpoints, just as monopolies and their ilk can deprive consumers of the benefits of innovative new competitors.
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Amy T Brantly Jennifer M Oliver 2021 “THE CORRELATION BETWEEN ANTITRUST ENFORCEMENT AND GENDER EQUALITY” Amy T. Brantly is a founding partner of Kesselman Brantly Stockinger LLP specializing in antitrust and business litigation. The views expressed herein are solely those of Ms. Brantly and are not attributed to her law firm. Ms. Brantly would like to give special thanks to Samantha Pannier who assisted in research for this article Jennifer M. Oliver is a partner at MoginRubin LLP, where she specializes in antitrust litigation and merger control work, privacy litigation, and general business litigation. Jennifer is also an officer of the CLA Privacy Section. The views expressed herein are solely Ms. Oliver’s and are not attributed to her law firm // stobo
First, women bear the brunt of anticompetitive and monopolistic behaviors in their role as consumers. Firms with market power have the ability to impose elevated prices with fewer competitive restraints. Without competition, a monopoly’s price is the market price. Even when faced with high prices, consumers often cannot substitute the monopoly’s product for a more affordable alternative. Supracompetitive pricing—the classic measure of antitrust harm—disproportionately affects women, because women drive a staggering 70-80% of all consumer purchasing in this country. 3 Women also find themselves the targets of price discrimination more often than their male counterparts, a relic of the outdated notion that women are spendthrift "shopaholics." One study conducted by the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs found that products marketed towards women and girls cost an average of 7 percent more than those marketed towards boys and men.4 Researchers have dubbed this phenomenon the "pink tax," and it is estimated to cost the average woman $1,351 per year.5 [Page 116] And, as discussed below, in the labor market women are systematically underpaid compared to their male counterparts. The lower income the consumer, the more they are harmed since higher income consumers can more easily absorb monopoly rents than customers with less buying power. Second, women workers suffer an inordinate share of monopolization’s consequences. As Senator Elizabeth Warren said during a recent conference, studies show that market consolidation "contributes to driving down wages and driving up income inequality."6 Among myriad other negative effects, concentrated market structures reduce competition in the labor markets, which leads to wage suppression. Consider, for example, the In Re High-Tech "no poach" cases, in which the Department of Justice sued Google, Apple, and others for colluding and agreeing not to recruit one another’s employees.7 This behavior is not limited to skilled employees; in the franchise no poach cases, fast food workers brought a class action case alleging that forbidding franchisees from poaching one another’s employees violated antitrust law.8 As the High-Tech case demonstrates, in concentrated markets employee mobility declines, either because there are simply fewer firms to move to, or because the small number of firms in the market facilitates collusion to suppress mobility and wages. When employee mobility is suppressed, low-level workers have even fewer opportunities to achieve career advancement or increased pay by moving to, or threatening to move to, another firm. Again, this affects female workers more than male workers. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of women have lost their jobs or voluntarily left the workforce, and many of those women were low level workers without the means to hire outside help.9 The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 227,000 jobs were lost in December 2020, with women accounting for 196,000 of those jobs (86.3%).10 If and when these women return to the workforce, many will be entry and low-level workers. [Page 117] Likewise, when wages are suppressed, women, and especially women of color, are affected disproportionately. Women make 79 cents on the dollar compared to men in the same jobs, black women make just 62 cents, and Latina women only 54 cents.11 When wages shrink, so do women’s unequal share of the wage pool. High level executives, on the other hand, may benefit from the employee wage and mobility suppression in these concentrated markets, since lower wages and expenses associated with employee mobility drive up corporate profits. As of 2020, there are still nearly 13 American companies run by a man for every company run by a woman.12 Women of color hold an even smaller share of management roles in U.S. companies, with Latina women at just 4.3% and black women at just 4%.13 Gender inequality also distorts our view of the labor markets. More than 30 years ago economist Marilyn Waring conducted a worldwide study that found that if workers were hired to perform all the unpaid work that women perform, unpaid work would be the largest sector of the global economy.14 In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic shed light on women’s unpaid work once again, causing some to call for stronger antitrust enforcement as a means to address outsized corporate power and address income inequality.15 Third, women entrepreneurs are disproportionately harmed by market concentration as well. While some argue that preserving consumer welfare is the singular paramount goal of American antitrust law, many others would agree that it should also seek to preserve the pathways that allow for new, efficient, innovative market entrants to compete. Monopolies are often bad for consumer welfare because, among other things, they have the power to exclude smaller firms that might otherwise contribute new, innovative, and/or less costly products to consumers. Women entrepreneurs are even more damaged than other would-be market entrants in this regard. Overcoming the barriers to entry in a concentrated market requires cash. Yet less than 5% of startup investment goes to women,16 and the average loan for women-owned businesses is 31% less than for male-owned businesses.17 [Page 118] And just as monopoly firms can raise prices with minimal consequence, they can also refuse to serve customers, which can be detrimental or fatal to the companies that rely on the monopoly’s product to survive. Consider, for example, the dominant role Facebook and Google play in the market for digital advertising, and the many small companies that rely solely on their digital advertising reach for sales leads. If the monopoly or oligopoly decides it will no longer serve market participants that are less profitable for the monopolist, those competitors are disenfranchised from participating in the market.
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Kati Cseres 2024 “Feminist Antitrust” Kati Cseres is an Associate Professor of Law at the Amsterdam Centre for European Law and Governance (ACELG) and Program Director of the EU Law Masters at the University of Amsterdam. She is the Co-Director of The Good Lobby Profs inititiave, which monitors the respect of the rule of law by holding the EU and national institutions and leaders accountable. Kati is Editor of the Journal Legal Issues of Economic Integration. //stobo
In 2021, an insightful interviewer asked Margrethe Vestager, EU Commissioner for competition law and policy, whether it was “time for a feminist antitrust policy”. The interviewer noted at “feminist policy has been used to denote not just gender equality, but an approach that is more inclusive of all underrepresented people”. In her answer, Vestager set out a number of important ways in which current (EU) competition law enforcement takes gender prominently into account. However, the gist of this question, namely what role feminism and its rich and multi-faceted scholarship could play in competition law and policy, remained unanswered. Feminist approaches go beyond adding gender to the analysis and investigate the deeper layers of legal rules, economic models and enforcement practices that entrench gendered power structures, dynamics, and institutional arrangements and (re)produce various forms of inequalities. By investigating markets’ embeddedness in social relations and relations to other non-market sectors, feminist economists and feminist political scientists point out how markets are underpinned by gendered biases, for example, in the case of pink taxes that involve gendered price discrimination, or how concentrated economic power can be a reflection of social dynamics and existing structural economic inequalities. As Nancy Folbre compellingly argued “[a] narrow definition of the economy leads to a narrow definition of exploitation” something that directly speaks to concerns competition lawyers have with regard to analysing market power. Feminists’ analytical lens is, in fact, intimately related to the analytical lens of competition law. The focus of their analysis concerns power structures and dynamics, and they investigate how various social and economic actors are impacted by these power inequalities and strive to control excessive power and change existing social, economic, and political structures. However, the site and scope of their analysis differ. Competition law is concerned with market processes, economic structures, and activities and with economic power and its consequences on the competitive process. Feminists, however, repeatedly and forcefully called attention to those activities, processes and arrangements that lie outside of the market and the economy, and analysed how power and its allocation in and outside of markets impact women and vulnerable people. At its roots, feminism is about equal rights and at its core, it is about redistributing power. As women’s experiences (often fundamentally) vary, and their social positions are shaped by multiple forms of injustice at the intersection of gender, race, social position, and geographic location, feminist theories show how gender, in complex intersection with other identifying characteristics, has been a core element in distributing resources among individuals in society. These perspectives provide an opportunity to broaden the legal and economic inquiry currently applied in competition law, and to rethink its role in markets and society and its relationship with the state and society. Feminist social science is one way to re-imagine how competition law and policy could become more inclusive in its analysis, and enforcement and ultimately, contribute to inclusive and sustainable growth in societies. Feminist approaches help to unpack the wide diversity of roles and functionalities that markets and the process of competition may have in human society. By critiquing a universal concept of the market, and regulation of competition, they reveal the existence of multiple forms of “market competition” and, that (competition) law does not lie in a particular ‘sovereignty’ but in pluralism as a way to conceptualise and regulate market competition. By taking a contextualised lens and by drawing attention to the complexity of the economy, economic activities and the embeddedness of markets in broader social, economic and political contexts, feminism provides a novel methodology to reassess allegedly “neutral” and objective competition rules, economic models and enforcement practices. Through its multidimensional and pluralist analytical lens, with a strong focus on human diversity and agency, feminists challenged mainstream economic accounts of markets and market actors and emphasised the importance of social norms in affecting both the process and the outcome of economic processes. In contrast to neoclassical economists, feminist economists have underlined the embeddedness of markets in geographically- and historically-specific social relations and their relations to other non-market sectors. Arguing that a market economy is always “embedded” into “the other economy”, they contend that markets are based on power structures and the invisible labour of women and, hence form a system of exploitation that conceives labour as a source of wealth and accumulation.