Feminism Kritik Supplement - Michigan 2024 CPSW

Fem k – updates
Enjoy!! –from: 'scotty p is the goat’ research group, aka Lily M., Lena, Lucas P., Maanyata, Norah P., Sonal S., Tavishi, Tenzin C.
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1NC---L---IP
IP reformations are not enough to solve gender inequality, only an expansion curated to radical feminism can solve.
Firestone ’79, (Shulamith Bath Shmuel Ben Ari Firestone was a Canadian-American radical feminist writer and activist, book republished 1979, “The Dialectic of Sex,” accessed 7.15.24, Ch.1, https://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/firestone-shulamith/dialectic-sex.htm,) T.C--NN
Sex class is so deep as to be invisible. Or it may appear as a superficial inequality, one that can be solved by merely a few reforms, or perhaps by the full integration of women into the labour force. But the reaction of the common man, woman, and child - 'That? Why you can't change that! You must be out of your mind!' - is the closest to the truth. We are talking about something every bit as deep as that. This gut reaction - the assumption that, even when they don't know it, feminists are talking about changing a fundamental biological condition - is an honest one. That so profound a change cannot be easily fitted into traditional categories of thought, e.g., 'political', is not because these categories do not apply but because they are not big enough: radical feminism bursts through them. If there were another word more all-embracing than revolution - we would use it. Until a certain level of evolution had been reached and technology had achieved its present sophistication, to question fundamental biological conditions was insanity. Why should a woman give up her precious seat in the cattle car for a bloody struggle she could not hope to win? But, for the first time in some countries, the preconditions for feminist revolution exist - indeed, the situation is beginning to demand such a revolution. The first women are fleeing the massacre, and sharing and tottering, are beginning to find each other. Their first move is a careful joint observation, to resensitise a fractured consciousness. This is painful: no matter how many levels of consciousness one reaches, the problem always goes deeper. It is everywhere. The division yin and yang pervades all culture, history, economics, nature itself; modern Western versions of sex discrimination are only the most recent layer. To so heighten one's sensitivity to sexism presents problems far worse than the black militant's new awareness of racism: feminists have to question, not just all of Western culture, but the organisation of culture itself, and further, even the very organisation of nature. Many women give up in despair: if that's how deep it goes they don't want to know. Others continue strengthening and enlarging the movement, their painful sensitivity to female oppression existing for a purpose: eventually to eliminate it. Before we can act to change a situation, however, we must know how it has arisen and evolved, and through what institutions it now operates. Engels's '[We must] examine the historic succession of events from which the antagonism has sprung in order to discover in the conditions thus created the means of ending the conflict.' For feminist revolution we shall need an analysis of the dynamics of sex war as comprehensive as the Marx-Engels analysis of class antagonism was for the economic revolution. More comprehensive. For we are dealing with a larger problem, with an oppression that goes back beyond recorded history to the animal kingdom itself. In creating such an analysis we can learn a lot from Marx and Engels: not their literal opinions about women - about the condition of women as an oppressed class they know next to nothing, recognising it only where it overlaps with economics but rather -their--analytic method. Marx and Engels outdid their socialist forerunners in that they developed a method of analysis which was both dialectical and materialist. The first in centuries to view history dialectically, they saw the world as process, a natural flux of action and reaction, of opposites yet inseparable and interpenetrating. Because they were able to perceive history as movie rather than as snapshot, they attempted to avoid falling into the stagnant 'metaphysical' view that had trapped so many other great minds. (This sort of analysis itself may be a product of the sex division, as discussed in Chapter 9.) They combined this view of the dynamic interplay of historical forces with a materialist one, that is, they attempted for the first time to put historical and cultural change on a real basis, to trace the development of economic classes to organic causes. By understanding thoroughly the mechanics of history, they hoped to show men how to master it. Socialist thinkers prior to Marx and Engels, such as Fourier, Owen, and Bebel, had been able to do no more than moralise about existing social inequalities, positing an ideal world where class privilege and exploitation should not exist - in the same way that early feminist thinkers posited a world where male privilege and exploitation ought not exist - by mere virtue of good will. In both cases, because the early thinkers did not really understand how the social injustice had evolved, maintained itself, or could be eliminated, their ideas existed in a cultural vacuum, utopian. Marx and Engels, on the other hand, attempted . a scientific approach to history, They traced the class conflict to its real economic origins, projecting an economic solution based on objective economic preconditions already present: the seizure by the proletariat of the means of production would lead to a communism in which government had withered away, no longer needed to repress the lower class for the sake of the higher. In the classless society the interests of every individual would be synonymous with those of the larger society. But the doctrine of historical materialism, much as it was a brilliant advance over previous historical analysis, was not the complete answer, as later events bore out. For though Marx and Engels grounded their theory in reality, it was only a partial reality. Here is Engels's strictly economic definition of historical materialism from Socialism: Utopian or Scientific: Historical materialism is that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all historical events in the economic development of society, in the changes of tile modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another-. (Italics mine)
IPR bad for Women
Institute for Women’s Policy Research ‘20 (Institute for Women’s Policy Research, “Innovation and Intellectual Property among Women Entrepreneurs” 10/28/20. Accessed 07/17/2024 https://iwpr.org/innovation-and-intellectual-property-among-women-entrepreneurs/) IL TG
Women make up growing share of U.S. entrepreneurs, with much of that growth driven by women of color (American Express Open 2017). Women are far less likely than men, however, to hold patents (Milli et al. 2016), which has important implications for their business success, particularly for those in STEM industries, where patents are more common. Similarly, Bell et al. (2016) show that children from minority racial and ethnic groups, apart from Asian children, are much less likely to grow up to be inventors: White children are three times as likely as Black children, and eight times as likely as Hispanic children, to become inventors as adults.
Previous research has found that intellectual property rights, including patents, can play an important role in business success. Many lenders consider patent ownership, or at least having a patent application filed, an important factor in making their funding decisions: patent holders are more likely to receive private equity financing from venture capitalists and typically receive funding more quickly than entrepreneurs who do not hold patents (Häussler, Harhoff, and Mueller 2012; Graham et al. 2009). Patents have also been linked to greater market value among established businesses (Hall, Jaffe, and Trajtenberg 2005). Higher rates of patenting or other intellectual property holdings among women business owners could improve their access to financing and help them achieve their growth aspirations and maximize revenues.
Progress toward gender and racial/ethnic equity in innovation would also benefit society. Diverse contributions are essential to identifying and developing solutions to the pressing problems confronting individual communities and the world more broadly. An array of unique standpoints offer invaluable perspectives for innovation. By integrating more women and people of color into the innovation ecosystem, we will benefit from the contributions of more talented inventors and the ideas, products, and solutions they can develop if provided the opportunity.
Until recently, data on the intellectual property (IP) holdings and other research and development (R&D) activities among entrepreneurs were limited. New data from the Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs, a new survey on employer firms gathered by the Census Bureau, however, provide an unprecedented opportunity to examine a broad array of IP holdings, patenting activity, and R&D activities among entrepreneurs by gender, and by race and ethnicity. This report documents participation in these activities among women- and men-owned employer firms and explores how these activities relate to business outcomes, such as funding, revenue, and survival.[1] The report also uses data from the 1997-2010 waves of the Survey of Business Owners to discuss women’s representation as entrepreneurs over time.
IPR is sexist and racist
Greene ‘08 (K.J. Greene, “Intellectual Property at the Intersection of Race and Gender: Lady Sings the Blues” 2008. Accessed 07/17/2024 chrome -extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1040&context=jgspl /) IL TG
Traditionally, IP scholarship and jurisprudence has not focused on race and gender inequality. However, these issues are receiving renewed attention in feminist scholarship and in critiques of existing power structures by those concerned with the treatment of people of color, women, and indigenous peoples in the international arena. Analytical inquiries that explore the rights of minorities, women, and indigenous peoples enhance the debate about IP reforms. Further, a focus on the least advantaged segments of society, such as blues women, shifts the debate to focus on the empowerment of artists who create, and not on empowerment of large conglomerates that control IP in the United States and abroad. Part I of this Article, briefly discusses the tenets of critical race theory to show that it can be useful in explaining how IP law has disadvantaged African-American artists and fostered their subordination. Part II explores how feminist critiques of IP benefit from examining the treatment of black women, using blues women of the 1920s as a focal point. Part III examines how the treatment of indigenous peoples parallels IP deprivations of blacks and women.
Many legal scholars increasingly recognize that the examination of race in legal discourse serves to illuminate the merits and values of the law.5 In contrast, before the 1980s, legal scholarship “virtually ignored legal theorizing based on the perspectives of people of color.”6 The invisibility of race in legal discourse changed with the advent of critical race theory (“CRT”) in the late 1980s, following the development of feminist legal theory in the prior decade. Critical race theory is not a unified construct, but it does set forth four core tenets.7 First, it posits that “race and racism are endemic to the American normative order.”8 Second, it posits that legal structures are “part of the social fabric . . . [which] constructs and produces race and race relations . . . [in support of] white supremacy.”9 Third, it contends that the construct of “colorblindness” in legal jurisprudence “ignores and cements the racial caste system constructed in part by law,” and thus perpetuates inequality for subordinated groups.10 Finally, CRT proponents advocate that “[legal scholars should be] working toward a norm of ‘racial equality’ where different groups will not continue to suffer the oppression and subordination they have suffered.”11
1NC---L+A---Trademark
Trademark law assumes innovation stems from big tech corporations and excludes artistic collaborations based on recognition and care
Halbert, Debora. "Feminist Interpretations of Intellectual Property." American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law, vol. 14, no. 3, 2006, pp. 431-460. HeinOnline. (Halbert- VP for Academic Strategy at the University of Hawai'i) II Norah
I have attempted to investigate the multiple ways feminist perspectives might be applied to intellectual property. Women who identify with feminist thought may take any number of positions on the issue of intellectual property, from endorsing a system that protects the authorial autonomy of women, or, by contrast, offering a critique of the underlying assumptions of a property discourse founded on a masculine construction of knowledge. While work has been done on the history of authorship and the ways women were either ignored and/or used to define the boundaries of literary texts, much less has been done on the contemporary state of authorship from a feminist perspective. Additionally, there is a need for a more direct feminist interpretation of the growing case law on copyright, patents and trademarks. 156 Feminism can provide a study of intellectual property with both a different viewpoint on the law and a method for articulating a different process. The alternatives grow from the case examples of women's creativity-quilting, knitting and feminist publishing to name a few. These examples suggest that whether "natural" to women or not, a different relationship to creative work can be articulated from a feminist perspective. • This is an approach that recognizes collaboration as much as individual contributions, recognizes that the author (of a quilt, dress or book) and the reader/user form an important relationship often based upon mutual respect, recognition, and care, and that there is no need to construct a definition of literature or "high art" premised upon reactive boundaries that declare what goo'd work is not-the work of women. A feminist perspective works at the foundation of the legal system by changing the assumptions upon which much of the law is based. Thus, there would ultimately have to be changes in the law that would reflect changes in the underlying social structure. The ultimate threat posed by the system of intellectual property, as currently conceptualized, is that it may further erode the values that can still be found in the types of creative endeavors that women produce. We can hope that by understanding the alternatives a feminist interpretation makes available, at least some creative people will be provided with a cultural space where creation is about more than property rights. Of course, a structural critique must be tempered by the fact that numerous women have turned the traditional system of intellectual property to their benefit. In the end, much as in the beginning, it is difficult to see a single feminist interpretation applying here. However, the many different interpretations create a more complex and richer dialogue on intellectual property, one that seems important to continue
Alternative
Mathew, Sasha (2021). A feminist manifesto of resistance against intellectual property regimes: reclaiming the public domain as an open-access information commons. Critical African Studies, 13(1), 115–126. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/10.1080/21681392.2021.1909881 (Mathew - Harvard Kennedy School, Cambridge, MA, USA) II Norah
The steady march of IP regimes across the global South has not been without resistance. We see the use of countervailing strategies and the application of IP law as a legal vehicle for ‘facilitating (or thwarting) recognition of diverse contributors to social discourse’ (Sunder Citation2006). The linking of identity politics (issues of recognition) with intellectual property (issues of redistribution) highlight the efforts of individuals from marginalized communities to resist appropriation and benefit materially from their own cultural production. Intellectual property law thus becomes more than a tool for incentivizing creativity and emerges as a terrain of struggle for social relations. The language of this struggle is voiced in terms of human rights, as both the Universal Declaration for Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights affirm the right of all peoples to be recognized for and materially benefit from their cultural creations.
However, the struggle of marginalized communities to benefit from their own production is not an even or fair one: the field is tilted. Their IP claims often do not succeed, not only because of the way the law is constructed, but equally because of their unequal bargaining capacities and resources (Sunder Citation2006). Consider how in India, Brahmin supremacy was sustained by their monopoly over education and the learning of English, and enforced by a violent system of intra – and inter-caste social restrictions and punishments (Chandra Citation2012). Even today, the upper-castes perceive themselves to be the natural inheritors of scientific research and practice in India; there is an appalling under-representation of Dalits, indigenous, and lower-caste groups in India’s leading scientific and technical institutions despite the fact they far outnumber the Brahmin minority. Access to knowledge production systems and to the markets that value this knowledge continue to be blocked by compounded access barriers. More pertinently, it is worthwhile to ask whether those long excluded from particular types of knowledge can truly be empowered upon the terrain of an alien epistemology built in tandem with social and political hierarchies whose very existence relied on scientific and moral justifications of inequality.
Intellectual property regimes purport to be neutral, but at their core, they presume gendered, racialized, epistemological hierarchies. The philosophical underpinnings of the intellectual property rights regime exhibit the binaries that characterize male-oriented epistemologies: male/female, public/private, scientific/primitive, rational/relational (Burk Citation2007). Feminist and decolonial ways of being and doing on the other hand, strive to transcend the binaries that naturalize domination and instead emphasize horizontality and mutuality. Feminist scholar Marion Crain (1857) advances an alternative vision of how women exercise power: ‘Power exercised in a community emanates horizontally, expanding outward in a web-like fashion, rather than vertically in a hierarchy (as quoted in Levy and Newman Citation2019, 119).
In the current Information Age, as forces of capital chart out new public domains from which to generate monopoly rents, human experience and behaviour itself has become the raw material for finished ‘prediction products’ in advertising marketplaces, as Shoshana Zuboff has argued (Zuboff Citation2018). Private property is an unsuitable organizing principle for society in the Information Age.
The opportunity to make meaning must be accessible to all on equal terms. In his Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto, Aaron Swartz declared that permitting those at elite universities, but not ‘children in the global South’ to access the world’s scientific and cultural heritage is ‘outrageous and unacceptable’ (Swartz Citation2008). And yet, as IP scholar James Boyle points out, much of 20th Century culture is ‘los

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