The alt makes intellectual property open access. That cements existing power dynamics and precludes indigenous counters to appropriation.

Whereas this theory of the public domain has served to undergird claims for traditional knowledge protection, so too has it proved a stumbling block. In the [*106] last decade, we have seen indigenous peoples and the poor, not unlike the Kerala rubber-tree farmer, turning their attention to appropriating intellectual property to their own ends. 37 Today, claims by indigenous people and the poor go beyond equitable benefit sharing; increasingly, the poor seek to own copyrights, trademarks, and patents in their own cultural and scientific innovations. 38 Strikingly, the traditional advocates for preserving the public domain have flipped. "Native peoples once stood for the commons," 39 but with the imbalance of TRIPs being more and more apparent, advocates of the poor are turning their attention to securing affirmative intellecual property rights for their own cultural and scientific innovations. Paradoxically, however, the concepts of "traditional knowledge," the "public domain," and "cultural environmentalism" are now proving to be obstacles to understanding poor people's knowledge as intellectual property. Claims by native peoples to hold intellectual property are resisted as threats to the public domain, or as the false consciousness of neo-liberalism, or as a radical assault on our intellecual property tradition, which encourages and promotes cultivation, not stewardship. 40

We should be wary of these declarations and "the romance of the public domain" itself. 41 Anupam Chander and I have argued that, while the banner of the public domain is taken up for all of humanity, a binary view of "intellectual property versus the public domain" may not be to the benefit of the world's poor. 42 Often, we argued, the benefits of an open-access commons go to the richest and the strongest. Differences in wealth, gender, and class determine whether one will in fact be able to convert the riches of the commons into lucrative property. This is what we call the "romance of the commons: the belief that because a resource is open to all by force of law, it will indeed be equally exploited by all." 43 Concerns arising from efficiency alone obscure the disparate effects of the commons on the poor. Staying attuned to the distributional effects of the public domain, in contrast, may require thinking about poor people's [*107] knowledge in "uncommon property" 44 terms, facilitating their capability to exert greater control over their property and to extract compensation from their knowledge.