The expansion of the public domain isn’t the radical strategy they think it is and serves to instead reinforce Western epistemologies and hierarchies of power.

This scholarship contributes valuable insights into how patent law curtails the flow of scientific information. The values of openness are important; a culture of openness and sharing facilitates exciting scientific discoveries. An ethic of openness within patent law and the public domain also supports the free flow of scientific information to marginalized communities. In other words, values of openness facilitate access. Patent laws can be relaxed to make medicines open and freely accessible to the poor globally.52 Scholarship in this area though is limited. One shortcoming comes from the constraints of law itself, as jurisprudential concepts of the public domain stem from legal cases.53 A more alarming limitation, however, is its unwillingness to thoroughly recognize systems of power and inequality.

Scholarship in this area assumes a nonhierarchical public domain and culture of science where an ethos of sharing and openness extends to all. On the contrary, feminist science studies scholars have produced valuable work challenging science by examining gendered power relations embedded within science and scientific knowledge production. For instance, scientific practices of sharing and collaboration have not always been extended to or benefited women, particularly women of color and lesbian women.54 Female scientists have been denied access to the scientific professions.55 Science has violently exploited indigenous peoples, their knowledge, and their lands.56 And scientific method itself is grounded within masculine theories of objectivity and rationality.57 In other words, values of sharing and openness within science have not benefited everyone equally.

One may argue that an ethic of open access that shapes an open public domain relates directly to relational feminism because it challenges liberal ideals of property and creativity by enabling collaboration and relationship building.58 This may apply to the context of copyright more easily than with patent law. With a feminist post-colonial reading in mind, I contend that open access models (e.g. creative science commons) present a narrow challenge to liberal notions of property and inventorship. Such models might incite collaboration and the sharing of scientific data by placing scientific materials in the public domain. Yet, they are meant to encourage a particular type of scientific and technological creativity, which is grounded in epistemologies of western science. Commercial scientists, university researchers, and do-it-yourself biologists may now be able to access scientific materials more freely, but the sharing of information fails to produce new visions of collaboration or what a more just science might look like. The ethics of openness and sharing that are deployed are not strong enough to ask, how might scientific information be shared more broadly with the public, Indigenous peoples, and marginalized groups who might benefit from it? How could such sharing and broader collaborations generate new methods of scientific knowledge production for producing better and more sustainable scientific practices so that more people could flourish? Theorizing of an open public domain fails to deliver on its challenge to inventorship and property because it reinforces models of western scientific knowledge production. More people might be able to access and share scientific information and materials, but the same narrow regimes of science are being produced. Thus, an open public domain might appear at first glance to disrupt norms of property and inventorship, but a post-colonial feminist reading reveals its limited scope. Theorizing an open public domain, without addressing norms of western science and the structural inequalities preventing access to scientific knowledge, produces a narrow analytic that only benefits those who already have the power to access public domain information. One must turn to a protective or egalitarian public domain for attention to inequalities. First though, attention is due to the notion of a hybridized public domain, where the public domain is imagined as a hybrid space where conceptual binary categories come undone and new visions for modernity are imagined.