We affirm the 1AC minus their use of the word ‘traditional knowledge’.

But there is a problem with the public domain. Those who create and wish to market goods and art that reflect traditions that are older than the twentieth century tend to find no help in the standard and established modes of intellectual property protection. Their work, no matter how creative or labor intensive or important to their cultural identity, is considered part of the grand global cultural commons. So multinational corporations can produce similar goods (pottery, cloth, garments, sculptures, jewelry, etc.) at lower prices. And these companies can leverage their marketing power better than small producers and merchants in poorer countries can. Significantly for many of these cultural groups, replication of their traditional forms of cultural expression can be disrespectful of histories, identities, and religions as well. Intellectual property offers very little support for collective dignity. As several scholars of indigenous and traditional cultural production have argued in recent years, the cultural production of local communities is devalued not only because it is produced by marginal communities with no political power, but also because so much of that cultural production reflects traditions older than copyright. You cannot protect what has long been in the public domain without significantly revising the entire global intellectual property system. Intellectual property does not treat all cultural expression equally. The weavers of Adinkra and Kente cloth in Ghana face competition from weavers working in Korea, China, India, and other parts of the world that host members of the Ghanaian diaspora. The patterns have a growing market. So many wish to mimic them. To accept that only the "new" shall be protected by intellectual property accepts the view that new is better than old. To mark Kente and Adinkra cloth as "traditional" is hegemonic. Traditions must reside permanently in the past, and they must be inferior to the "innovations" of the present and future. Importantly, the government of Ghana deftly markets the past. It distinguishes its traditional cloth as "authentic." It is hand-woven, not mass-produced. Global market logic demands that Ghana invest value in protecting its weavers' work as "traditional" because that is what differentiates it from the hundreds of other similar expressive goods flowing across trade channels. Efforts to create new forms of intellectual property law to protect "traditional knowledge" could merely reaffirm the permanent inferiority of creative works that have older origins and deeper modes of production. These works would be stuck just outside of modernity in an effort to fully exploit the modern market. The very marginality of what has come to be known as the Traditional Cultural Expression movement-its reason for being-renders it peripheral to global discussions of cultural policy. Only when represented by a friendly and supportive nation-state such as Canada or Australia do Traditional Cultural Expression movement members find their claims considered by policymaking officials. But this is state-driven action. The role of the state in the potential protection of traditional cultural expression presents many problems. How shall the state determine who is and who is not a member of a group trying to protect such expressions? What if the group is in opposition to the state? What if the group is split among factions? Who will determine the terms of licensing for songs, styles, and designs? The potential for censorship is daunting. So efforts toward a sui generis traditional cultural expression regime have been halting and have faced strong criticism. These efforts have generated some of the most heated and philosophically complicated debates within intellectual property.