Collective authorship is a move in the wrong direction and results in tokenism – vote neg to embrace a more fluid form of authorship that allows for the expansion of the public domain.

Some insights may be gleaned from discussions over authorship in copyright law. Responding to the Enlightenment notions of individual authorship, some legal scholars concerned about gendered social relations suggest more robust notions of authorship. In her examination of slash fan fiction, Sonia Katyal, a U.S. legal scholar, argues for recognizing creative works as dynamic authorial performances where normative narratives within a text are coded and re-coded.228 This would open up possibilities for female authorship to offer alternative readings of a text by interrogating normative gender categories.229 Additionally, Carys Craig, a Canadian legal scholar, re-imagines the author as participant and citizen, rather than origin or source of a creative work.230 She argues for notions of authorship emphasizing formation of identity as connected to both self and community.231 According to Craig, copyright law should embrace a notion of authorship that encourages creativity, exchange, and relations with others.232 These more fluid notions of authorship are also appealing for rethinking inventorship and crafting a broader notion of the public domain. Moving away from inventorship as the original moment of conception would help justify demands for more fluid exchange of ideas in the public domain and less restrictive IP policies to enable such cultural borrowings. Broader conceptions of inventorship also open up possibilities for recognizing multiple forms of knowledge production. When inventorship is valued as dynamic, collaborative, and linked to community, it generates space for new forms of knowledge production to be recognized and valued. This would entail going beyond naming indigenous peoples as “joint inventors.”