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Viewing patents, copyrights, and trademarks through careful observation, the most important feminist methodological tool, presents clear data that women are underfunded and underrepresented in patents, copyrights, and trademarks, even as some of those trademarks are clearly gendered. Analyzing IP through the lens of feminist legal theory allows a clearer view of the problems of gender disparities within each of the IP fields.

If we fail to look critically at the patriarchal forces operating within our culture, they grow stronger in the shadows. When discreet groups are excluded from inventorship, authorship, or the marketing and branding channels that traffic in trademarks, everybody loses except for the inferior industry players who try to use IP law as a means to repress competition. We forfeit the missing inventions and creative works that people shut out from the necessary tools and resources cannot produce. And we lose the businesses they might have started, and the mentorships that could have followed their successes.

Emerging scholarship contributing to the field of women’s studies examines the relationship between intellectual property and gender. Scholars from a range of disciplines ask how intellectual property law relates to gendered social relations. Historians analyze nineteenth century patent activity in the United States to show how female patent ownership increased when laws of coverture were abolished.157 Sociologists provide empirical evidence that female life scientists hold fewer United States patents than their male colleagues and are less likely to disclose inventions to their university technology transfer office.158 In addition, legal scholars question the epistemological foundations of intellectual property law grounded in Enlightenment notions of an individual inventor creating and molding through faculties of disembodied reasoning and objectivity associated with conceptions of masculinity.159 Legal scholars also warn that patent law can threaten women’s health care, for example, in the case of breast cancer gene patents.160 This is exciting and important work. Intellectual property has become a site for feminist inquiry. An aim of this section is to discuss and analyze this emerging scholarship further in order to bring it firmly into critical intellectual property scholarship.

In 1993, legal scholar Richard Epstein challenged the value and the utility of feminist scholarship in the academy, posing the question whether feminism had something, anything, to say about a variety of legal doctrines, including intellectual property.3 The question is somewhat surprising, especially in hindsight. Even at the time that he posed the question, feminist scholars had already begun addressing most of the topics Epstein recited in his litany of legal subject matter,4 and the literature on these topics continues to grow. Thus, the question might seem to have been answered even before it was posed or certainly in the years following; the substantial body of feminist literature exploring these subjects might be answer enough.

But the query was an obviously rhetorical question, evidently intended to imply that even if feminist theory is good for understanding anything in the law, it has little applicability outside a relatively small set of “women’s issues,” such as equal employment compensation, definitions and defenses in rape, and matters of family law.5 The substantive answer to this more serious, implied indictment was perhaps best articulated in the recent comment above by Donna Haraway, observing that feminist inquiry is fundamentally about determining who has power and how it is being used.6 Thus, feminist studies of law should be applicable not only to considerations of the impact of tax, contract, property, copyright, patent, trademark, tort, corporate, and business law on women, but also to exposing within these bodies of law the foundational cultural assumptions that affect both women and men.

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

Arguments about feminist epistemologies are not meant to suggest that women as women will always see creative work as collective or an act of care. Women can be as motivated by profit-making as men.76 However, the feminist standpoint does suggest there are alternatives to intellectual property that can be used by both women and men who seek to escape what is often considered the only possible path to protect creative work—intellectual property law.

At the same time, intellectual property law is uniquely poised to govern the most intimate aspects of the representations of human life, including the depiction and commodification of racial, sexual, ethnic, and political identities. Indeed, far from being a value-neutral regime, the history of intellectual property law reveals an astonishing number of incidences where the laws of copyright, trademark, and patent have been used—often with great success—to silence transgressive depictions of sexuality, sexual identity, and gender expression. Earlier in the history of intellectual property law, protection for patented inventions did not extend to so-called “immoral” innovations.3 Today, within the realm of trademark and copyright law, courts have routinely protected the rights of intellectual property owners to enjoin expressive uses of their works under the argument that sexualized depictions “tarnish” the wholesomeness of the original.4 More specifically, recent cases demonstrate an increasing interest in prohibiting suggestions of homosexuality in appropriated works.5 Consider the recent series of cease-and-desist letters sent by DC Comics to a New York art gallery and web site over a series of paintings that showed the superheroes “Batman and Robin” in homoerotic poses.6 Other examples involve a series of legal threats levied against the maker of a film, Ernest and Bertram, which depicted the two Sesame Street characters “Ernie and Bert” in a same-sex relationship,7 as well as against the makers of a series of greeting cards that featured John Wayne and Clark Gable with gay themes.8 Mattel also protested a film’s depiction of its sterling commodity Barbie engaging in a sexual relationship with a female servant.9 A variant of this issue even reached the Supreme Court in a case that held that the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) could enjoin the use of the term the “Gay Olympics” on similar grounds.10

As these events demonstrate, queering mainstream works, while endlessly entertaining, can also be construed as a brazen act of civil disobedience against the frameworks of intellectual property.11 While depictions of sex and sexuality have always been fraught with cultural controversy, these incidents demonstrate how such incidences of “semiotic disobedience” increasingly personify an underlying tension between our legal regimes of intellectual property and free speech, revealing how issues of distributive justice are invisibly intertwined within the interstices of commodified representations.12 While constitutional speech frameworks tend to treat expression as part of an ongoing contribution to layers of democratic dialogue, intellectual property frameworks tend to honor expression as an excludable, privately owned resource. Even though fair use defenses are meant to mediate the boundaries between property and speech, their inherent lack of predictability sometimes contributes to the ongoing instability within the field at large. Often, as these cases show, the resolution of these conflicts results in the exclusion of certain types of recoding over others.

Microplastics are increasingly found in drinking water, but there is no evidence so far that this poses a risk to humans, according to a new assessment by the World Health Organization.

However, the United Nations body warned against complacency because more research is needed to fully understand how plastic spreads into the environment and works its way through human bodies.

A basic point that the dollar bears overlook is that for the U.S. dollar to depreciate, it has to depreciate against the world’s other major currencies. Yet currently it would seem that those currencies are beset by problems as serious, if not more serious, than those besetting the U.S. dollar.

The troubles currently facing the Euro, the main challenger to the dollar’s dominant international reserve currency position, would illustrate this point. Not only is Europe experiencing a very much deeper economic recession than the United States and not only does Europe now have significantly negative interest rates. Europe also appears to be on the cusp of another round of the Eurozone debt crisis that could pose an existential threat to the Euro.

For the United States, such a loss would be manageable so long as the transition is slow and does not cause a sudden run on the dollar. The tangible benefits of having the global reserve currency have always been up for debate, with some studies suggesting it adds less than 1 percent to gross domestic product. Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke recently noted that the benefits are "mostly symbolic." However, from a geopolitical perspective, a more distributed international financial system would surely undermine the United States' ability to slap sanctions on companies that do business with U.S. rivals. That said, the United States' power does not rest on any single tool. A weakening of its stranglehold over international financial transactions would weaken just one method for the United States to project power. Our view is that the dollar would likely still play a large part in any successor currency regime. That role might not approach, as it does today, the roughly 45 percent of cross-border payments nor the 64 percent of global foreign exchange reserves held, but the dollar would likely retain the largest share in a successor regime — especially if the eurozone falls apart. While this might require the United States to adjust its debt situation, it is likely that the transition would be slow as other countries gradually diversify their holdings and payments away from the dollar, given that the dollar has no clear successor. The U.S. debt situation could certainly come to a head over the next two decades (as could those of other major economies) but in the aftermath, the overall strengths of the U.S. economy would make recovery easier. Superpowers throughout history have seen the levers that enforce their status come and go, but the very definition of a superpower is that it naturally develops new ones to replace those that break. Until a single, unified bloc can balance the United States in the same way that the Soviet Union did, it will remain the center of the global geopolitical system regardless of the role the dollar plays.

Which, more or less, it continues to be, despite the hallucinations of people like Gaetz, and to the chagrin of Lula and his ilk. Central banks around the world still keep most of their foreign-exchange reserves in dollars. And exporters everywhere love to invoice in dollars — the euro tops the dollar only in Europe itself. Most tellingly perhaps, individual people outside the US hoard an estimated $1 trillion in dollar notes as if those were gold ingots.

All the reports in recent decades of the dollar’s imminent demise as global money have therefore been vastly exaggerated. The euro didn’t displace it, nor will crypto currencies or the Chinese renminbi. One reason is the inertia of network effects. As Steven Kamin, a former director of international finance at the Federal Reserve Board, puts it, “everyone uses the dollar because everyone uses the dollar.” Even China, which hates dollar supremacy, only seems to be diversifying away from the US currency, but really isn’t.

The sanctions against Russia are contributing to a realignment of global currency holdings. The countries supporting sanctions on Russia have strong geopolitical incentives to continue holding and using dollars for international reserve and payment purposes since doing so reinforces the constraining impact of the sanctions and helps ensure their future effectiveness. Any economic incentives these governments previously had to diversify away from traditional currencies, particularly the U.S. dollar, by increasing the proportion of other currencies in their reserves and international transactions must now be weighed against the geopolitical incentives to hold dollars. As security concerns eclipse economic ones, the United States and Europe are limiting their economic dependence on foreign adversaries and pushing to relocate manufacturing and supply chains to allied nations in what has come to be known as “friend shoring.” Just as countries are beginning to source goods and inputs from friendly nations, they are likely to adopt the currencies of friendly nations. The size of the sanctioning coalition, the number of nonparticipating sanctions supporters, and the number of countries under the U.S. security umbrella, make large-scale currency diversification away from the dollar unlikely, as shown by two recent studies.

Together, the coalition arrayed against Russia accounts for more than 90 percent of global currency reserves, approximately 80 percent of global investment, and 60 percent of world trade and world economic output. Overcoming that dominance would be difficult even if every country that has declined to sanction Russia fell in line behind an organized anti-dollar coalition.

The United States’ openness to the global economy can be measured by the cross-border flows of goods and services (trade); of capital (foreign direct investment and other types of financial assets); and of people (immigration).[1] By some of the most central measures, depicted in the figures below, US disengagement from globalization has been significant, particularly in comparison to the general trend in and behavior of other large high-income democracies. Former President Donald J. Trump may have pursued that decoupling with his policies discouraging offshoring of US manufacturing and imposing tariffs on imports. But the trend of US deglobalization began with US administrations well before Trump took office in 2017.

The figures also illustrate that these successive US governments’ efforts to protect selected domestic workers by insulating them from the global economy have already failed—the US workforce is no better off, and in many ways worse off, than other advanced democracies, which increased their openness to the global economy at the same time: Labor force participation in general and for women in particular is lower; manufacturing jobs have declined as a share of employment at the same rate; and labor earnings as a share of GDP have followed the same path.

Finally, the Great Recession did not lead to a deterioration in international security. Because political instability and violence can impinge on cross-border flows, increases in international conflict can dampen cross-border trade and exchange. During the initial stages of the crisis, multiple analysts asserted that the Great Recession would lead states to increase the use of political violence as a tool to stay in power.44 They voiced genuine concerns that the global economic downturn would lead to an increase in conflict—whether through greater internal repression, diversionary wars, arms races, or a ratcheting up of great-power rivalries. Violence in the Middle East, piracy on the high seas, border disputes in the South China Sea, riots in European cities, and even the disruptions of the Occupy movement fueled impressions of a global surge in public disorder. As fiscal austerity in the developed economies curtailed social spending, economists predicted an explosion of unrest. 45

Initially, there was some evidence of deterioration. Following the 2008 financial crisis, there was a spike in global piracy, particularly off the Horn of Africa. The International Maritime Bureau reported that in 2009 alone, there was a 40 percent surge in piracy attacks, with attacks near Somalia quadrupling during the same period. The Institute for Economics and Peace, which has constructed the Global Peace Index annually since 2007, reported in 2013 that there had been a 5 percent deterioration in global peace since 2008. 46

The diversity of financial institutions, with their differences in business models, liability structures, time horizons, and investment motivations could contribute greatly to financial resilience. Since the 2008 crisis, financial institutional diversity has helped sustain market liquidity while banks have curtailed their market-making activity [a readiness to buy and sell securities to accommodate their clients] due to regulatory changes and business strategies. Improving resiliency and liquidity in financial markets is critical to better finance the real economy, allocate risks properly, and support financial stability.

Many financial institutions and practices, together with regulatory and accounting requirements, however, tend to exacerbate cyclical fluctuations in the economy by buying assets or extending credit in good times and cutting back in bad times. It is important, therefore, to promote financial diversity and foster counter-cyclical behaviors among institutions capable of doing so. This helps reduce the risk of market imbalances leading to liquidity crises and offset self-reinforcing dynamics in times of financial stress. This risk has become important to guard against as the International Monetary Fund’s just-released World Economic Outlook finds the global economy entering a synchronized slowing phase.

Myth 7: Market Concentration Has Caused Labor’s Share of Income to Fall26

Neo-Brandeisians have argued that increased market concentration has reduced the share of national income going to labor. The idea is that as companies gain more market power, they take an increased share of economic output, with workers getting less.

Twice over the past 50 years, the Census Bureau has significantly changed how it collects and records income statistics. In 1993 and 2013 the Census Bureau changed its methods in an effort to collect better information from high-income households. These changes created two major discontinuities and distorted the time-series so that the change in measured income inequality in those years was as much as 15 times the average annual change found for the entire 50-year period. At the time, the Census Bureau explained in detail what it had done. It also explained the limitations the changes imposed on the use of its income-inequality measure to look at changes over extended periods. In subsequent use of the data by the Census Bureau and others, however, those warnings have been neglected.

The simple solution would have been to isolate the distortions caused solely by the changes in data-collection techniques and adjusted the previous years’ measures to reflect the effect of the changes. We made these adjustments and they are shown in the nearby figure. The blue line is the actual reported Census Bureau measurement of income inequality. The yellow line eliminates the effects of the 1993 and 2013 discontinuities caused solely by changes in measurement technique. The black line shows income inequality when the value of all transfer payments received is counted as income, income is reduced by taxes paid, and the two technical corrections are made.

Of course, if your goal is merely to spread misinformation—kind of common social media—you’re probably not too concerned about getting the facts wrong over and over and over. Such a person is also probably not too interested in info suggesting American poverty is way lower than many people think. As a group of economists write in the new study “Evaluating the Success of the War on Poverty since 1963 Using an Absolute Full-Income Poverty Measure”: “While the official poverty rate fell from 19.5% in 1963 to 10.5% in 2019, our absolute full-income poverty measure—which uses a fuller income measure and updates thresholds only for inflation—fell from 19.5% to 1.6%.”

Or how about a recent study by Gerald Auten and David Splinter that found that income inequality has changed little over time, challenging the widespread notion that it has substantially increased. Specifically, they discovered that the top one percent of income earners received nine percent of after-tax income in 2019, only a slight increase from eight percent in 1960. Then there’s research by my AEI colleague Michael Strain that found income inequality across all households—after accounting for taxes and government transfers and estimated with a Gini coefficient—fell by more than five percent between 2007 and 2019.

Taxing the rich is one of the central policy debates in this time of rising inequality. Elite taxation can change the distribution of income in society, support equitable growth, and finance public goods and services that improve the quality of life for everyone. None of these goals are well served, however, if taxes lead to high levels of tax flight among U.S. millionaires. Progressive taxation, especially at the state level, ultimately depends on the embeddedness of the tax base. In other words, are the rich “mobile millionaires,” readily drawn to places with lower tax rates? Or are they “embedded elites,” who are reluctant to migrate away from places where they have been highly successful?

Supply-side economics has long argued that taxes on the rich cause avoidance behavior and reduce the incentive to work, invest, and innovate. Amid the growing red state/blue state rivalry in the United States, tax incentives for migration have become a new focus of debate. Why would rich people continue to live in New York, New Jersey, or California when they could save large sums in taxes by moving to places such as Florida, Texas, or Nevada? Of course, taxes also fund public goods that the rich consume—not even the richest city dweller can get to work without public infrastructure—but top earners have greater ability to opt out of many public services such as schools and social services. From this view, the rich seem motivated and mobile—sensitive to taxation and readily capable of exit.

China is, famously, the world’s factory and a giant market for the world’s companies. More unremarked is its growing role as the world’s research-and-development laboratory. Between 2012 and 2021 foreign firms increased their collective Chinese research personnel by a fifth, to 716,000. Their annual R&D spending in the country almost doubled, to 338bn yuan ($52bn). Add investments by local firms and China now matches Europe’s R&D tally (see chart). Only America splurges more.

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The trend of companies "reshoring" their workforces has accelerated this year, according to a new report from a nonprofit that tracks the trend. The U.S. is on track to add 220,000 jobs from reshoring or foreign direct investment in 2021, up from a record 160,000 jobs in 2020, according to the Reshoring Initiative, which promotes reshoring and helps manufacturers set up shop in the U.S.

The increase comes as the Biden administration has been pushing to add more manufacturing capacity in the U.S. to strengthen supply chains for essential items like computer chips used in cars and tech devices and raw materials used in electric vehicles. Shortages of those products have caused costs to rise and slowed production at U.S. manufacturers, weighing on overall economic growth.

The current reshoring of manufacturing may be more than just a fad.

The ability to claim that a product was “Made in America” is a symbol of pride for many businesses across the US. Supporting the national economy and providing jobs to fellow citizens is a clear motivator for many of our country’s manufacturers, but the rising costs of goods and labor over the years has seen companies shifting operations offshore and buying materials and products from other countries in an attempt to save money.