Open Access is a great idea absent the histories of slavery and indigenous genocide. Their calls fundmanetally rely on the premise there was once a good IP regime which has never been the case for indigenous people whose land and knowledge are able to be seized under the guise of public domain. Instead use an abolitionist ethic that rejects ideas of making patent law great again.
Vizoso and Byrnes 23 (Julia Choucair Vizoso was editor in chief of the online journal, Sada. Her research interests include Middle Eastern politics, authoritarianism, and identity politics. She is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Yale University. Chris Byrnes joined RPX, where he served as a patent-risk advisor and patent-litigation insurance-claim manager. He has advised clients of all size czs on hundreds of patent litigations involving non-practicing entities (i.e., “patent trolls”) and worked closely on several of RPX's headlining transactions (e.g., a nine-figure deal in 2020 with Intellectual Ventures). In 2016, Chris co-founded Corporate Accountability Lab (CAL), a human rights non-profit organization, to experiment with new ways in which IP commoning and international trade laws could be used by communities and IP producers as tools for collective liberation., Abolitionist creativity How intellectual property can hack digital power, 9 February 2023, https://www.tni.org/en/article/abolitionist-creativity//ATW) Abolitionist creativity builds on the contributions of contemporary open-access movements, but fundamentally shifts the crux of the problem. Open-access movements are centrally concerned with how to share ideas and culture more freely; how to facilitate free speech and free access while sustaining innovation. These concerns are a product of the location and historical moment from which they emerged. In the 1990s, computer scientists and cyberlaw scholars in Europe and the United States who participated in the rise of software and the internet as mass tools (the so-called Information Age) sought to resolve a particular challenge: how to realise the potential and hope of the internet while copyright law grows increasingly restrictive and punitive.
Instead, we begin our analysis by looking at the broader global system in which knowledge and information operate: a settler-colonial system that extracts wealth, knowledge, and culture from economically marginalised communities and inequitably redistributes their economic fruits to the wealthiest and most powerful. This approach is in line with critiques that activists and critical scholars have long made of open-access movements: that the central focus on liberty values ignores concerns about equality; that a romantic notion of the ‘public domain’ as a neutral landscape where every person can reap its riches ignores its real role in exploiting the labour and bodies of people of colour, women, people from the Global South, and the impoverished. We now know that the ‘public domaining’ of Indigenous knowledge about local flora and fauna, traditional medicines, folklore, or traditional cultural expressions has enabled Big Pharma to take Indigenous knowledge, transform it into IP, and become the exclusive owner of that knowledge: a phenomenon known as biopiracy.
Abolitionist creativity also disagrees with an ideological belief that runs through some prominent segments of the open-access movements, namely that the system once worked well, but that ‘unfortunately, our IP regimes have strayed far from their original purposes’. For the colonised, for Indigenous Peoples whose collective knowledge has been ransacked, for communities forced into oppressive trade agreements (e.g. TRIPS), for the rising number of modern slaves working in global supply chains powered by intangibles, it is hard to see how the IP system ever worked for them – or what decades of reformist attempts inside IP law in the US have accomplished. For abolitionists, the system is not broken and in need of reform, tweaking, and tinkering. It is working as it was designed to work, as a settler-colonial legal and economic structure. And we are running out of time and of magical thinking waiting for public policy to somehow turn favourable in a corporate-dominated oligarchy.
Open-access movements must also confront an uncomfortable fact: Big Tech is on their side. The conventional wisdom that large corporations always prefer stronger IP regimes to block new competitors, or that zealous enforcement of IP law favours the powerful, is not borne out by the historical record. With the exception of the pharmaceutical industry, monopolists in technology-intensive industries have resisted strong patent protection throughout history: the railway industry in the nineteenth century, IBM in the computing industry of the 1960s and 1970s, Big Tech today. Google, Facebook (Meta), and Twitter are trying to selectively apply IP enforcement, spending millions of dollars lobbying to ensure as little IP friction as possible inside markets in which they already have dominant market power, to have unfettered control over data and knowledge, to continue to make ‘colossal advertising profits from content produced for free by users’, and to avoid the dreaded IP dispute.
If the most powerful actors are the real winners in an open-access world, shouldn’t we re-evaluate the claim that ‘information wants to be free’? If free access means continuing to ignore the pleas of Indigenous communities to stop the biopiracy, cultural expropriation, and ‘public domaining’ of the colonised, why do we continue to hold it as an absolute value?
Unlike open-access movements, abolitionist creativity recognises that the global economy into which we release our creativity is not a neutral, level playing field. Surrendering or limiting the existing rights to creativity in our current system does nothing to interfere in the structure of oppression. It simply cedes agency to more powerful actors – agency that should be ceded down, not up. Rather than relinquish our rights on behalf of a kind of libertarianism for the Information Age, we should open our eyes to the material ways our creativity enters the economy and reifies structures of digital (and other types of) power.