Their focus on anticounterfeiting measures and the expansion of trademark protection turns a blind eye to the bigger system of intellectual property which upholds and entrenches a capitalist reality.

When scholars come to the recent changes in intellectual property law, unfortunately, more often than not they are overly concerned with one part of the elephant, that in which they have become highly specialized. For instance, those who are focused on copyright issues discuss the Copyright Acts of 1976 and 1998, and the threats that copyright expansion poses to Internet users with regard to the fair use doctrine, freedom of speech, and even access to culture (Lessig 2004; Vaidhyanathan 2001; Gordon 1989; Netanel 1996). In contrast, authors who are occupied with patents debate the patenting of living organisms, the role of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, created in 1982,1 the changes in the markets for technical knowledge, and so on (Merges 1987; Mazzoleni and Nelson 1998; Cockburn, Kortum, and Stern 2002). In turn, authors interested in trademarks focus on anticounterfeiting measures, the expansion of the scope of trademarks, and so on (Port 1993). Among international scholars who focus on the Global South, there are concerns about costs for the less developed countries of the international IP order established by the TRIPS agreement (Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) (Richards 2004; Correa 2000a; Correa 2000b; Sell 2004; Drahos and Braithwaite 2002). The list could be continued ad nauseam.

So what is wrong with the existing research? Nothing, except that it misses the big picture, and therefore the relationship of intellectual property with the totality of capitalism. Each one of these approaches is right when it points to a pillar, a rope, or a solid pipe. But that does not tell us what the elephant looks like nowadays: Intellectual property now is a totality, a system.

There was a time when patents and copyrights could be understood separately from each other. A time when talking about pillars, ropes, and solid pipes was good enough. That was the era of industrial capitalism. During that period, there was no such thing as an “intellectual property system”; there was no elephant: only an assortment of almost independent rights, evolving in their own ways. But now things are quite different, as shown in the following. Intellectual property institutions are no longer supporting actors, but protagonists in the capitalist theatre.