IP seeks to dominate every thought and encode itself into every form of communication. Every genocide begins in the genocide of our freedom.

The transformation of intellectual property law from an esoteric legal subject to a topic of daily conversation and debate has occurred in a relatively short span of time. Over the past few years, the aggressive expansion of property claims into every domain of knowledge and cultural practice has interpellated almost everyone, from the academic to the musician, into the heart of the debate. No account of the contemporary moment would be complete without an examination of the dominance of the copyright sign or the effect of the small print of the trademark notice on our lives. In many ways, the mere act of looking at, reading, listening to, making, understanding or communicating any objects that embody thought, knowledge or feeling is as fraught with danger and anxiety today as the appropriation of material wealth or trespassing onto private property were through much of human history (Bagchi et al. 2005: vi).

The anxiety and conflict are certainly not restricted to a set of geographical locations, but the nature of conflict gets configured differently as we move from the United States and Europe to parts of Asia and Africa. In the United States, the crisis is represented in terms of the shrinking of the public domain and of the commons by the extension of copyright, the linking of file sharing and peer-to-peer activities with the global war on terror, and the emergence of a new breed of criminals in the form of students sued by music companies for downloading MP3s online. In South Africa, the government is bulldozed by pharmaceutical corporations who have attempted to prevent it from declaring statutory licenses that will make AIDS drugs more accessible, and in many parts of Asia, the proliferation of cheap technologies of media reproduction creates a parallel economy that threatens the monopoly of old media players (Cullet 2001). The concern over the expansionist tendency of intellectual property has also motivated a rearticulation of the importance of the commons of knowledge and cultural production. This is exemplified by various phenomena among the increasing popularity of non-proprietary modes such as free software and open content. A number of these concerns historically have emerged from the experience of Europe and the United States. But when one attempts to translate the terms of the intellectual property debate into the contemporary experience of countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa, it is difficult to locate any easy indexical reference to ideas such as ‘the digital commons’.