Reading intellectual property as a mass noun makes its colonial and racial implications visible.
Vats, Associate Professor of Law, secondary appointment in Communication, University of Pittsburgh, 20 (Anjali, “The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans,” p. 5-6 GAL)
Intellectual property citizenship, as I use the term here, points to the seemingly permanent nexus of copyright, patent, and trademark law and citizenship, a concept that necessarily implicates race, coloniality, racial capitalism, and personhood. It is an analytical tool for understanding the structural complexities of the legal regimes that define the mass noun “intellectual property” and a frame for rendering visible the power structures that prevent racially equitable outcomes in intellectual property contexts. “Citizenship, “a term that is often considered for its formal legal properties, is also a culturally negotiated concept through which certain individuals are included/excluded from the body politic. When it intersects with intellectual property discourse, as it has for hundreds of years, citizenship operates a discursive vehicle for excluding racially marginalized groups from legal practices of knowledge production and ownership. 14