IP law’s not inevitably economized.
Mtima, 15—Professor of Law, Howard University, and Founder and Director of the Institute for Intellectual Property and Social Justice, an accredited Non-governmental Organization Member of the World Intellectual Property Organization (Lateef, “From swords to ploughshares: Towards a unified theory of intellectual property social justice,” Intellectual Property, Entrepreneurship and Social Justice: From Swords to Ploughshares, Chapter 12, pp. 266, dml)
Intellectual property social justice occupies a unique space in the IP social reform discourse. Whereas the predominating reformist rhetoric confronts the challenge as one of importing pertinent social values into the IP regime, intellectual property social justice eschews any implicit conceptualization of intellectual property protection as inherently devoid of non-economic/socially benign objectives. Whether as an implement of positive social law or an acknowledgement of natural rights and the “social contract”, 3 the ultimate function of intellectual property protection is to cultivate human development and advancement: the intellectual property regime is structured to encourage, access and apply human creativity and innovation because it is socially useful to do so. While economic incentives and commoditization mechanisms are certainly elements of intellectual property protection, they are not its only features or concerns. Intellectual property social justice regards the values of equitable access, inclusion and empowerment as essential and indeed intrinsic to the enterprise. From this perspective, intellectual property social justice confronts “IP law and economics”4 extremes as promoting and perpetuating socially wasteful inefficiencies in the contemporary intellectual property protection apparatus. Through IP Empowerment, intellectual property social justice realigns the mechanism so as to recoup the resulting social losses and maximize the overall efficiency and productive impact/output of the intellectual property system.5