T USFG - CNDI 2024

T – USFG / Framework
1NC
1nc – Interp
The text of the resolution calls for debate on hypothetical government action
Ericson 3 (Jon M., Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts – California Polytechnic U., et al., The Debater’s Guide, Third Edition, p. 4)
The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each topic contains certain key elements, although they have slightly different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented propositions. 1. An agent doing the acting ---“The United States” in “The United States should adopt a policy of free trade.” Like the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the agent is the subject of the sentence. 2. The verb should—the first part of a verb phrase that urges action. 3. An action verb to follow should in the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a program or policy into action though governmental means. 4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred. The entire debate is about whether something ought to occur. What you agree to do, then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an audience to perform the future action that you propose.
And, “IPR Protection” requires government action
Li ’23 [Yon; 2023; lawyer at Henan Shilin law firm; Science of Law Journal, “Analysis of the Status Quo of Intellectual Property Protection in China in the Era of Big Data,” Vol 2, No. 5]
In order to implement the specific work of intellectual property protection, the state and government must put forward the corresponding protection mechanism, which fully reflects the importance attached to intellectual property protection. Therefore, the government and judicial departments should update and improve the relevant laws in light of the actual situation. For example, from the perspective of patent law, works law, etc., the protection of intellectual property rights is clearly defined. Count the related infringements, and formulate corresponding punishment measures for these infringements, and further improve the judicial supervision system, so that the owners and beneficiaries of intellectual property rights can be protected by law [4].
They obviously don’t meet any of the topic words – which makes their aff unpredictable and undebatable. Their advocacy also creates moral hazard that leads to affs only about individual self-care so even if you think this aff is answerable, the ones they incentivize are not, so assume the worst possible affirmative when weighing our impacts.
1nc – Fairness Impact
Our impact is fairness—there are two internal links—
1. Limits—a bounded topic serves as a predictable stasis point for debate that guarantees thematic coherence and debatability for both sides—absent defined limits, debate’s competitive incentives create a race to the margins that create exhausting research demands and ends with debaters burning out.
2. Ground—a pre-defined controversy ensures a vibrant lit base and in-depth clash —they’re just reading neg arguments on the aff so switch-side debate can solve their offense – all 2AC defense to this claim will rely on concessionary ground which isn’t a stable basis for a year of debate and locks in an overwhelming aff side bias.
3. Debate is a game and we’re both here to win – this means procedural questions like T come first. The role of the ballot is to vote for whoever does the better debating over the resolutional question.
Shively 2K – Professor of Political Science, Texas A & M (Ruth, Political Theory and Partisan Politics, p. 181-2)
The requirements thus far are primarily negative. The ambiguists must say “no” to—they must reject and limit—some ideas and actions. In what follows, we will also find that they must say “yes” to some things. In particular, they must say “yes” to the idea of rational persuasion. This means, first, that they must recognize the role of agreement in political contest, or the basic accord that is necessary to discord. The mistake that the ambiguists make here is a common one. The mistake in thinking that agreement marks the end of contest. In most cases, however, our agreements are highly imperfect. We agree on some matters but not on others, on generalities but not on specifics, on principles but not on their applications, and so on. And this kind of limited agreement is the starting condition of contest and debate. As John Courtney Murray writes: We hold certain truths; therefore we can argue about them. It seems to have been one of the corruptions of intelligence by positivism to assume that argument ends when agreement is reached. In a basic sense, the reverse is true. There can be no agreement except on the premise, and within a context, of agreement. (Murray 1960, 10) In other words, we cannot argue about something if we are not communicating: if we cannot agree on the topic and terms of argument or if we have utterly different ideas about what counts as evidence or good argument. At the very least, we must agree about what it is that is being debated before we can debate it. For instance, one cannot have an argument about euthanasia with someone who thinks euthanasia is a musical group. One cannot successfully stage a sit-in if one’s target audience simply thinks everyone is resting or if those doing the sitting have no complaints. Nor can one demonstrate resistance to a policy if no one knows that it is a policy. In other words, contest is meaningless if there is a lack of agreement or communication about what is being contested. Registers, demonstrators, and debaters must have some shared ideas about the subject and/or terms of their disagreements. The participants and the target of a sit-in must share an understanding of the complaint at hand. And a demonstrator’s audience must know what is being resisted. In short, the contesting of an idea presumes some agreement about what that idea is and how one might go about intelligibly contesting it. In other words, contestation rests on some basic agreement or harmony.∂ The point may seem trite, as surely the ambiguists would agree that basic terms must be shared before they can be resisted and problematized. In fact, they are often very candid about this seeming paradox in their approach: the paradoxical or "parasitic" need of the subversive for an order to subvert.∂ But admitting the paradox is not helpful if, as usually happens here, its implications are ignored; or if the only implication drawn is that order or harmony is an unhappy fixture of human life. For what the paradox should tell us is that some kinds of harmonies or orders are, in fact, good for resistance; and some ought to be fully supported. As such, it should counsel against the kind of careless rhetoric that lumps all orders or harmonies together as arbitrary and inhumane. Clearly some basic accord about the terms of contest is a necessary ground for all further contest. It may be that if the ambiguists wish to remain full-fledged ambiguists, they cannot admit to these implications, for to open the door to some agreements or reasons as good and some orders as helpful or necessary, is to open the door to some sort of rationalism. Perhaps they might just continue to insist that this initial condition is ironic, but that the irony should not stand in the way of the real business of subversion.∂ Yet difficulties remain. For agreement is not simply the initial condition, but the continuing ground, for contest. If we are to successfully communicate our disagreements, we cannot simply agree on basic terms and then proceed to debate without attention to further agreements. For debate and contest are forms of dialogue: that is, they are activities premised on the building of progressive agreements.∂ Imagine, for instance, that two people are having an argument about the issue of gun control. As noted earlier, in any argument, certain initial agreements will be needed just to begin the discussion. At the very least, the two discussants must agree on basic terms: for example, they must have some shared sense of what gun control is about; what is at issue in arguing about it; what facts are being contested, and so on. They must also agree—and they do so simply by entering into debate—that they will not use violence or threats in making their cases and that they are willing to listen to, and to be persuaded by, good arguments. Such agreements are simply implicit in the act of argumentation.',∂ Imagine, then, that our two discussants have the following kind of exchange:∂ Mary Cuns don't kill people; people kill people.∂ Tom: Yes, but guns make it a lot easier for people to kill one another.∂ Mary: That's not necessarily true. There are lots of other murder weapons—knives or rat poison, for instance—that may be just as handy and lethal.∂ At this point, the argument reaches an impasse. Tom has presented i claim that Mary does not accept. Thus, if the argument is to continue, Tom must either find a way to convince Mary oi this claim or he must go on to a different line of argument. Let us say that, in this case, lorn backs up his initial claim with further evidence. Perhaps he has some evidence to show that people are less apt to survive a gunshot wound than they are to survive being stabbed or poisoned. Mary then relents on this point:∂ ∂ Mary: All right, I'll grant you that gun shot wounds an? more apt to kill people. But that's exactly the reason I want lo own a gun—so I can effectively protect myself and my family.∂ Tom: Well I sympathize with that motive, but 1 don't think owning a gun is the best way to protect yourself. In fact, I've heard that people who own guns are more apt to get injured or killed them¬selves than to protect themselves against an intruder.∂ Mary: What?! I find that very difficult to believe.∂ Here, again, our discussants reach an impasse. If the argument is to go further, they must either find a way to agree on the disputed claim, or move on to another claim (if there is one). Thus, if Tom has some further evidence that Mary will find convincing, they can continue this line of reasoning; if he does not, then they must move on to something else or give up the argument completely.∂ This is the ordinary ebb and flow of debate. Argument continues .is long as there is some hope of progress in coming to agreement or as long as there are other lines of argument to be explored. But if there∂ ∂ comes a point a I which the two sides run out of new claims or cannot igree about the facts supporting claims already made, the argument is effectively over. The participants may continue to shout at one an¬other, as they often do, but there is no longer anything positive or informative that can come from their interaction. There is nothing more to be learned and nothing that either side will find convincing.∂ The point here is that in arguing—and the point holds equally for other forms of contest—we assume that it is possible to educate or persuade one another. We assume that it is possible to come to more mutual understandings of an issue and that the participants in an argument are open to this possibility. Otherwise, there is no point to the exercise; we are simply talking at or past one another.∂ At this point, the ambiguists might respond that, even if there are such rules of argument, they do not apply to the more subversive or radical activities they have in mind. Subversion is, after all, about questioning and undermining such seemingly "necessary" or universal rules of behavior.∂ But, again, the response to the ambiguist must be that the practice of questioning and undermining rules, like all other social practices, needs a certain order. The subversive needs rules to protect subversion. And when we look more closely at the rules protective of subversion, we find that they are roughly the rules of argument discussed above. In fact, the rules of argument are roughly the rules of democracy or civility: the delineation of boundaries necessary to protect speech and action from violence, manipulation and other forms of tyranny.
1nc – Topic Specific Education
Our interpretation refuses binary conceptualizations of politics in favor of detailed advocacy, pragmatic coalition building, and creative lawyering.
Vats, 20—Assistant Professor of Communication and African and African Diaspora Studies and Assistant Professor of Law at Boston College (Anjali, “Decolonizing Creatorship and Remaking Personhood,” The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans, Conclusion, pp. 205-208, dml)
Williams offers a starting/ending point for imagining where anti-racist and anti-colonial activists should commit their energies. For instance, the racial dynamics of the conflicts between R&B and hip hop and Gaye and Pharrell may have justified advocating for neither or both parties in an amicus brief, by critiquing the divide-and-conquer ethos of the situation and the case and by critiquing the capitalist model around which victory was built. Advocating for intellectual property egalitarianism in a way that is legally and politically legible requires pushing back against accepted (intellectual) property doctrines, which conceal racial logics. The Korematsu Center’s amicus brief in Tam, for instance, performs such a task by grounding its opposition to trademarking the Slants’ band name in the racial histories of the United States, specifically those that resulted in the internment and economic disenfranchisement of Japanese Americans during World War II. In many ways, merely creating counterscripts—i.e., advocating in an amicus brief even without attendant relief—accomplishes this end. Repeatedly engaging and refusing those myths that constrain creatorship, citizenship, and personhood pushes back against whiteness as property and shifts public cultural conversations.
One easy objection here is that an amicus brief that tells a just and compelling racial story does not have legal impact. However, this conclusion is both untrue and, at least in part, irrelevant. The Color of Creatorship has demonstrated how the unspoken desires that structure the economics of intellectual property law are based not in fact but in myths and feelings. Racial scripts are about attachments to social constructions of race, property, nation, and person, not objective or rational conceptions of those terms.
As CRT scholars from Richard Delgado to Keith Aoki contend, telling stories in legal contexts shifts the purportedly race neutral language, representations, and emotions around which law is crafted, in ways that are invisible and seemingly unproductive but important. The Love Symbol, Beast Mode®, and the TKDL make claims of inclusion alongside radical claims to dignity and humanity, which are effective even though (intellectual) property law continues to be rigged against people of color. Telling legal stories about the personhood of people of color in intellectual property terms pushes back against the foundational racism and racial sentimentality of copyrights, patents, and trademarks.
These examples provide a useful starting point for thinking about how people of color can become intellectual property fugitives, thereby confronting the two-body problem that Stephen Best notes arose with the decoupling of physical labor and intangible labor. Such decoupling transformed people of color, particularly Black people, into commodity forms that, because they were the objects of property ownership, definitionally could not own their own intangible labor. The Love Symbol, Beast Mode, and the TKDL refuse this decoupling, by occupying and reclaiming the spirit of fugitivity. That occupation is a decolonizing move, which begins a long, arduous process of delinking intellectual property from modernity/ coloniality and its implications.
Returning to Best’s analysis of the relationship between the fugitive and embodiment—specifically that Fugitive Slave Laws gave rise to a twobody problem that allowed whites to treat Black people as “living property”—creates a bridge to a new and productive rereading of fugitivity, a concept that can be occupied to create a radical approach to intellectual property politics. Fred Moten, before defining the same term, asks, “How do we think the possibility and the law of outlawed, impossible things?”41 He responds to that inquiry by writing on fugitivity as a resistive concept, practice, and mode of being:
This fugitive movement is stolen life, and its relation is reducible neither to simple interdiction nor bare transgression. What can be attained in this zone of unattainability . . . is some sense of the fugitive law of movement of black social life ungovernable, that demands a para-ontological of the supposed connection between explanation and resistance.42
Harney and Moten’s conception of fugitivity describes a “stolen life,”43 in which anti-racist and anti-colonialist scholars and activists “do not come to pay their debts, to repair what has been broken, to fix what has come undone.”44 Harney and Moten continue:
We cannot be satisfied with the recognition and acknowledgement generated by the very system that denies (a) that anything was ever broken and (b) that we deserved to be the broken part; so we refuse to ask for recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls . . . once we have torn shit down, we will inevitably see more and see differently and feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming.45
The intellectual property fugitive, a figure I have sketched out through the examples in the previous chapter, engages law with the knowledge that intellectual property law can never be effectively reformed, even if it periodically benefits people of color, because it is too deeply intertwined with racism and racial capitalism to be redeemable. Moreover, the intellectual property fugitive performs radical resistance to copyright, patent, and trademark regimes that are mired in national identity, citizenship, and racial capitalism through consistent acts that “tear down the structure.” The goal of the intellectual property fugitive is not only a series of policy proposals to tinker with intellectual property law but a hegemonic commitment to constant critique, particularly storytelling that rescripts racial formations, remakes racial feelings, and creates possibilities for more spacious conceptions of belonging, in knowledge and human cultures.
Mat Callahan, in an article titled “Why Intellectual Property? Why Now?” writes:
Under these conditions, capitalist interests view IP not merely as an opportunity to seek profit, but more fundamentally as the underpinning of a global regime, especially the trade treaties and international agreements that dictate the flow of all goods and services be they material or intellectual. Indeed, the threat many movements pose . . . is not primarily one of piracy or “theft” of the intellectual property of one corporation or another; rather, the threat is to the foundation of private property and the ownership of ideas as a conceptual framework for law or governance of any kind. In other words, within any and every conflict revolving around IP are the core principles of capitalism: possessive individualism, private appropriation of public wealth—especially natural resources—and the despoiling or destruction of the commons. Thus, what makes IP a vital battlefront for our time is that the stakes are capitalist enslavement or human liberation.46
Though Callahan f

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