Counterstorytelling creates a break in the academy in which we can insert people of color into IP law – Only by breaking the stereotypical nature of language can we begin to have racial discourses about what it means to create

As each of the themes that we highlight demonstrates, intellectual property law, as much as law more generally, is about crafting narratives which are implicitly or explicitly racialized. Whether through understandings of intellectual property which marginalize people of color by emphasizing labor as creativity,183 narratives of piracy which characterize those in the developing world as thieves,1 84 or stories of the public domain which erase colonial histories,' 8 5 copyright, trademark, patent, right of publicity, trade secret, and unfair competition law are rife with normative racial discourses of creation. One important function of Critical Race IP scholarship is to render visible through counter-storytelling those narratives that animate intellectual property law's non-neutrality around race. Engaging the underlying characters, plots, and values these stories endorse is a vital step in undoing intellectual property's whiteness. Moreover, we might also read creative works and embodied performances as part of the practice of speaking back to intellectual property law, in the tradition of the legal fiction of scholars such as Derrick Bell and Richard Delgado.1 86 For instance, 2 Live Crew's "Pretty Woman," Biz Markie's "Alone Again," and Randall's The Wind Done Gone function as their own types of counterstorytelling, operating as "sites of memory" 187 for alternative intellectual property truths. As Schur argues in Parodies of Ownership, African American performance, including hip hop and parody, operates as both powerful critique and pragmatic remaking of intellectual property law.' 8 8 Counter-stories need not be literary or musical. For instance, protests against Crazy Horse liquor1 89 and Marshawn Lynch's trademarking of the nickname BeastMode' 90 might be read as embodied and performative practices of storytelling, which both assert different epistemological standpoints than those in dominant culture. Each standpoint is used to understand knowledge production and critique the historical exclusion of people of color, particularly black people, from the privileges of intellectual property ownership. Exploring the role of storytelling in knowledge production, in forms that both comport with and break from those traditionally accepted in the academy, is a productive goal for Critical Race IP, and builds upon a long history in CRT. Storytelling is a practice that has been and remains important to Critical Race IP, as a mechanism for locating the voices of marginalized groups and centering them in legal contexts that otherwise erase them.