IP law is a contingent response to specific historical circumstances- its not natural or inevitable

(Sasha, A feminist manifesto of resistance against intellectual property regimes: reclaiming the public domain as an open-access information commons, Critical African Studies, 13:1, 115-126, DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2021.1909881 )

As capital spills across borders, privatizing everything it meets, it relies upon the protective casing of law to smooth its course. The intellectual property law regime itself has been expanding in reach, driven forward by the chariots of international trade. Different knowledge systems have passed through the homogenizing mill of intellectual property law: stripped of all cultural context, their value is determined by market exchange mechanisms. Christopher Clapham notes that the expansion of Europe from the late 15th through 20th centuries, resulted in the establishment of a global system marked not only by Eurocentric military, administrative and economic power, but by structures of knowledge production including written languages …educational systems, and conceptual apparatuses such as the infrastructure of modern science, which themselves derive overwhelmingly from Europe’. (2020) The universalist claims of intellectual property regimes are thus problematic: as they steadily advance, expanding the frontiers of knowledge commodification, it is useful to remember that intellectual property as a legal regime mediates politics and economics (Grewal, Kapczynski, and Purdy 2017), transforming political hierarchies into economic value and presenting them as neutral, objective and ahistorical. Intellectual property regimes also illustrate how capitalism privileges efficiency over distributional claims (Chander and Sunder 2004). This paper begins by surveying recent scholarship that argues that intellectual property is a highly contingent, historically specific legal relationship, and by no means natural or given. The particular legal framework that intellectual property embodies is drawn from a patriarchal, Anglo-Saxon tradition, which in many ways was a predecessor of modern Western capitalism. An intersectional critique of the institution of intellectual property law follows– which is the f irst aim of this paper. Following extant critical scholarship, intellectual property law is named as a system of oppression and its gendered, racist, imperialist assumptions are exposed. I attempt to show that its vectors of power are systemic rather than individualistic; and address how it facilitates multiple, interlocking exclusions. The second aim of this paper is to build a normative argument for the revitalization of the public domain as a feminist decolonial enterprise. I conclude with a manifesto against contemporary enclosure movements and the privatization of the public domain.