The affirmative is the reification of an intellectual property rights regime that is the product of the colonial western legal order and American empire.

Bronwen joined Newcastle Law School as a lecturer in September 2014. She is Module Leader for Land Law (UG stage 1) and International Intellectual Property Law (LLM), and teaches patent law on Patents and Trademark law (UG Stage 3). She is module leader for Key Concepts in Corporate and Commercial Law, and teaches Comparative Law on the Fundamentals of Legal Translation, interdisciplinary courses taught in the School of Modern Languages.

Dating from the industrial revolution, IP law has been developing incrementally to the mutual benefit of, mostly European, countries as they developed. 9 1 The protection awarded has gradually increased in terms of the duration and strength of rights granted to IP owners. It is interesting to note, however, that the United States, for example, took a long time to reward foreign creations with IP protection. As an ex-colony of Great Britain, commercial policy in the US was punitive towards the ex-coloniser.92 Indeed, while early IP law in the US discriminates between US citizens and foreigners in general in terms of the cost of applying for a patent, it reserves the highest fee for British applicants. Before any application for a patent shall be considered by the commissioner as aforesaid, the applicant shall pay into the Treasury of the United States, or into the Patent Office, or into any of the deposite banks to the credit of the Treasury, if he be a citizen of the United States, or an alien, and shall have been resident in the United States for one year next preceding, and shall have made oath of his intention to become a citizen thereof, the sum of thirty dollars; if a subject of the King of Great Britain, the sum of five hundred dollars; and all other persons the sum of three hundred dollars.93 Furthermore, during its development phase, the US freely copied the creative works and inventions of non-Americans in a deliberate policy aimed at fast-tracking its own growth. The copying of literary works in the US reached a, 'sensational scale' in the midnineteenth century 94 prompting Charles Dickens to 'plead"' for the US to pass a copyright law protecting international copyright owners.96 At that time, copyright was limited to, 'a citizen or citizens of these United States or resident therein'.97 What's more, the law stated that, 'nothing in this act shall be construed to extend to prohibit the importation or vending, reprinting or publishing within the United States, of any map, chart, book, or books, written, printed, or published by any person not a citizen of the United States'.' The ability to legally copy the inventions and creative works of European creators has thus contributed to the growth and development of the United States. This did not prevent Americans from criticising Japan for doing exactly the same thing. Japan is now considered to be a developed country99, but Richard Vaughan complains that Japan's, 'meteoric rise was not based on Japanese innovation, but on the copying of Western ideas'.' In response to the defence that Japan was only doing the same as the US did in its development phase Vaughan says that times are different now and points to the greater significance of intellectual property. This seems to be a very weak argument and Vaughan's criticism of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Thailand for also basing their, 'technological and economic advances' on 'their piracy of Western technology" 1 can just as easily be seen as an argument in favour of copying as a means of achieving development, as condemnation of the practice. As Susan Sell has noted, 'the way that issues are framed can make a great deal of difference in terms of what is and is not considered legitimate'.102