IP exploiting indigenous communities is not a novel idea – it goes back hundreds of years with the roots of the racial capitalism

. Why Critical Race IP Neither infringement nor Copyright Wars are new phenomena. Their repeated themes stretch back hundreds of years. 42 William Patry argues that the most recent Copyright Wars occurred in 1998, "when copyright owners obtained from Congress unprecedented rights to control access to and use of their works." 43 With the radical changes brought by Betamax, VHS, the Internet, and Napster between the 1970s and 1990s, big content owners found themselves in deeply unfamiliar and rapidly shifting territory that impacted their core business models. 44 These technological developments which made copying, transforming, and remixing copyrighted and trademarked works easy for the average consumer fundamentally threatened the profits of entertainment industries that had previously held near monopolies on production and distribution in their respective markets. 45 Similarly, technological changes ushered in by the era of biotechnology demanded legal and cultural responses. 46 Negotiating the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights in 1994 (TRIPS Agreement)  [*744]  created an unprecedented global intellectual property regime, 47 compliance with which was encouraged, through more and less coercive means. 48 Mark Getty of Getty Images, 49 proclaimed that intellectual property is "the oil of the twenty-first century." 50 Though the accuracy of this statement is debatable, 51 the argument for protecting that "oil" gathered (maximalist) steam. 52 The global public response to these expansions of intellectual property rights was considerable. Pressure for free and open culture, 53 critiques of biopiracy, 54 adbusting and culture jamming campaigns, 55 and large scale protests 56 were some of the ways people pushed back against the rise of intellectual property maximalism. The economic conditions ushered in by the rise of the post-Fordist economy not only transformed intellectual property into an increasingly "precious commodity," 57 - one which legal scholars almost exclusively theorized through the lens of law and economics 58 - they  also marked an evolution in the racialized approaches to handling knowledge produced by people of color. We therefore situate the rise of intellectual property maximalism and "information feudalism" 59 through the lenses of racial capitalism and neoliberalism, both of which are helpful in making race visible in a legal regime which purports to regulate knowledge production in race neutral ways. In invoking the term racial capitalism, 60 we refer to the work of Cedric Robinson to understand how intellectual property's economic structure is "always already" raced. 61 As Robinson writes, "The historical development of world capitalism was influenced in a most fundamental way by the particularistic forces of racism and nationalism." 62 He continues: Racialism … ran deep in the bowels of Western culture, negating its varying social relations of production and distorting their inherent contradictions. The comprehension of the particular configuration of racist ideology and Western culture has to be pursued historically through successive eras of violent domination and social extraction that directly involved European peoples during the better part of two millennia. Racialism insinuated not only medieval, feudal, and capitalist social structures, forms of property, and modes of production, but as well the very values and traditions of consciousness through which the peoples of these ages came to understand their worlds and their experiences. 63 In essence, capitalism - an enterprise racialized at its core and inception 64 - progressed in ways which magnified and exacerbated the  racialization of intellectual property economies. The connection between race and intellectual property is certainly not new, but it has evolved with the coincident ascendance of the technology economy and intellectual property maximalism. We are not attempting to articulate the master narrative of race and intellectual property. Nor do we intend a comprehensive history of the decades before Critical Race IP scholarship began to take root. Rather, we wish to narrate, in broad strokes, an unfolding of events in which race, capitalism, and intellectual property set the stage for Critical Race IP, whose name and characteristic themes we elaborate upon in Part II of this article.