IP is intrinsically settler-colonial and built to coopt Indigenous knowledge in the name of protecting property
Julia Choucair Vizoso and Chris Byrnes 23, Vizoso is an independent knowledge producer and co-founder of the art collective AbolishIP. She works on environmental and climate justice in the Arab world, teaches courses on political economy, and occasionally translates Arabic literature into English. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Yale University and an MA in Arab Studies/BS in Foreign Service from Georgetown University, Byrnes is an intellectual property (IP) lawyer, independent scholar, and co-founder of the art collective AbolishIP. He focuses on ethical IP licensing, web3-based IP commoning, and hacking IP to protect biodiversity and empower radical imaginaries. He holds a JD from Georgetown University, an MTS in Religion, Ethics & Politics from Harvard University, and a BA in Physics from Denison University, 2-9-2023, "Abolitionist creativity", Transnational Institute, https://www.tni.org/en/article/abolitionist-creativity //MRK
Instead, we begin our analysis by looking at the broader global system in which knowledge and information operate: a settler-colonial system that extracts wealth, knowledge, and culture from economically marginalised communities and inequitably redistributes their economic fruits to the wealthiest and most powerful. This approach is in line with critiques that activists and critical scholars have long made of open-access movements: that the central focus on liberty values ignores concerns about equality; that a romantic notion of the ‘public domain’ as a neutral landscape where every person can reap its riches ignores its real role in exploiting the labour and bodies of people of colour, women, people from the Global South, and the impoverished. We now know that the ‘public domaining’ of Indigenous knowledge about local flora and fauna, traditional medicines, folklore, or traditional cultural expressions has enabled Big Pharma to take Indigenous knowledge, transform it into IP, and become the exclusive owner of that knowledge: a phenomenon known as biopiracy.
Abolitionist creativity also disagrees with an ideological belief that runs through some prominent segments of the open-access movements, namely that the system once worked well, but that ‘unfortunately, our IP regimes have strayed far from their original purposes’. For the colonised, for Indigenous Peoples whose collective knowledge has been ransacked, for communities forced into oppressive trade agreements (e.g. TRIPS), for the rising number of modern slaves working in global supply chains powered by intangibles, it is hard to see how the IP system ever worked for them – or what decades of reformist attempts inside IP law in the US have accomplished. For abolitionists, the system is not broken and in need of reform, tweaking, and tinkering. It is working as it was designed to work, as a settler-colonial legal and economic structure. And we are running out of time and of magical thinking waiting for public policy to somehow turn favourable in a corporate-dominated oligarchy.