Schedule

There are only eleven herbs and spices. It’s the same recipe every time, at every location. You buy it, but you don’t own it. Culture is, at its core, ideas, transmitted across generations through media like food, music, clothing, and stories. In our modern legal system, where individuals own concepts, what happens when one people finds that their culture has become the intellectual property of another? This paper explores corporate America’s relationship with intellectual property law and its impact on Black ownership of culture. Deprivation of agency in producing food and inability to perpetuate culinary traditions can cause one to approach their culture not as something they create, but something they passively purchase. Similarly, the lack of ownership of one’s traditional clothing and music pervert their roles in culture, equating signifiers of heritage with those of wealth and promoting a culture based upon buying itself from others. Without owning one’s cuisine, music, and dress, one cannot own their stories, and thus, their identity. Much of the blame for this lies on intellectual property law, which has been consistently used against Black America, barring ownership of the very culture they create. With this in mind, one must ask, “who owns Blackness?”

Since approximately 2013, some American independent inventors have mobilized inside and outside institutional channels to protest U.S. patent law. These inventor-activists perceive recent patent reforms, such as limiting injunctive relief, restricting the scope of subject matter eligibility and allowing administrative challenges to patent validity, as existential threats to independent inventors and the nation. Rather than patent abolition or minimalism, the inventor-activists call for patent maximalism.In this essay based on my dissertation research, I unpack how inventor-activists use cultural capital to justify a collective action frame—grievances, prescriptions for reform, and tactics—in ways that draw upon and reinforce inegalitarian aspects of the American inventor archetype and American society more generally. I find that to position themselves as worthy of protection, their calls for patent maximalism as urgent, and their tactics as righteous, the inventor-activists’ boundary work can veer into sexism, ethnocentrism, and anti-blackness. I argue that the inventor movement should prioritize inclusion, and that policymakers should prioritize diversity in the inventor community, if inventors wish to imagine and implement a more equitable future for the emerging “knowledge economy.”

The communities of the predominantly queer, African-American, and Latine “ballroom scene” are focused around competitive dance and performance art forms including voguing and other forms of gender performance. Ballroom culture is inextricably connected with queerness, race,
and family. Ballroom communities create chosen families while intentionally exploring and
subverting expectations around gender, race, sexuality, wealth, and class. Ballroom culture is
centered around competition among groups called “houses” that act as surrogate families for members. Many of the most prominent houses are named for legendary houses of fashion design such as Dior, Chanel, Escada, Gucci, Balmain, and even Juicy Couture; and house members adopt house names as their own professional surnames. This project examines the intersection of trademark law, identity, personal transformation, and social justice that results from the repurposing and adoption of trademarks within ballroom culture. This examination highlights one way in which trademark law fails to recognize social justice considerations and can reinforce artificial social hierarchies rather than helping to overcome them; and suggests ways to combat this shortcoming.

“We are heirs, not owners”, claims Lucely Pio Morais, reffering to a collective statement that is at the heart of a transnational social-environmental movement of Brazilian Cerrado healers, called Articulação Pacari. The aim of this article is to present the life story of Lucely, a quilombola and healer, and her struggles in defence of territorial, cultural, social and environmental rights, with a particular focus on how capitalist (intellectual) property relations intersect with these political processes. Lucely has faced historical exclusions rooted in the contradictions and inequalities generated by colonialism, modernity and capitalism, which threaten the existence of her community, the practice of traditional medicine, the intergenerational transmission of traditional knowledge of medicinal plants and the life of the Brazilian Cerrado. Through an analysis based on body-territory and territory-body theoretical approaches, the article shows that Lucely confronts the struggles through a powerful and complex politics of resistance that is articulated through ancestral connections, medicinal plants integrated interactions, socio-political networking, the occupation of international and national political spaces and demands for a combination of social rights. Furthermore, the article argues that this politics is enacted through trans-scale and trans-temporal mediations that subvert conventional boundaries of space, such as territorial and political state borders, and time, such as the chronological and linear order of technological innovation and intellectual property rights. This research was carried out using a method that combines socio-historical contexts and life stories, that were heard through interviews with Lucely and observed through her everyday life. Lucely´s life story and politics of resistance deserve to be presented as a way of getting to know her, re-centering worlds and knowledge governance from social-environmental perspectives and imagining and building possible futures.

Current U.S. intellectual property laws fail to acknowledge the use of traditional knowledge (TK) and traditional cultural expressions (TCEs), enabling corporate exploitation of cultural heritage and perpetuating misrepresentation in entertainment and creative industries. While intellectual property laws are rooted in utilitarian policy—and focus on incentivizing creation rather than ensuring ethical use—this narrow focus ignores the increasing importance of cultural accountability and consumer demand for transparency. Existing IP laws allow companies to profit from cultural narratives without consultation or acknowledgment, shaping public perceptions that harm originating communities and consumers. This article proposes modifying existing copyright and trademark principles to encourage responsible cultural engagement. First, it advocates for a mandatory disclosure framework, requiring creators to publicly acknowledge their use of TCEs seeking copyright registration. Second, it argues for excluding sacred cultural elements from copyright eligibility, ensuring that companies cannot claim exclusive rights over culturally significant expressions. Third, it introduces a certification mark system, allowing consumers to identify companies that engage in ethical cultural borrowing and revenue-sharing with originating communities. This certification mark would serve as a market-driven mechanism to incentivize companies to adopt responsible practices while giving consumers the power to make informed choices. These reforms are essential because research confirms that entertainment shapes societal perceptions and reinforces stereotypes, making public acknowledgment critical. Additionally, studies show that consumers care about ethical representation and want the ability to make informed choices. Significantly, this framework will not stifle creativity or innovation but will ensure that as creators continue producing entertainment and art, they do so respectfully and collaboratively with cultures, fostering a more inclusive and ethical creative industry.

In a prior paper, I sought to add concreteness to the debate on whether protecting traditional knowledge (TK) is better done through recognition of customary law or through the development of sui generis laws at the national or supra-national level. In that paper, I made a proposal for how to implement, in African countries, the recognition of customary law in domestic law as a mechanism for providing protection of traditional knowledge and folklore. I address issues such as jurisdiction, applicable law, and the relationship between the customary courts and the courts of the metropolitan state. That paper left open the broader challenge of how to go after misappropriators of TK and Folklore who are foreign residents or who carried out the misappropriation in other countries. In this paper, I examine the question of cross-border recognition of TK judgments between the metropolitan state and other states and what we can learn from other such systems of recognition of IP judgments. Here I note that this would be limited not only to TK and TCE misappropriation claims but also to contractual disputes including the validity of any TK transfers or assignments and licenses. It is primarily through the contractual and licensing pathway that I believe the most purchase for international recognition of TK and TCE related judgments is most likely to succeed under current rules. I propose a private law approach to complement the public law approach of the international treaty negotiations at WIPO.

This paper examines the often invisible contributions of digital workers—frequently located in low-income countries—who perform vital tasks in training and refining AI systems. It argues that while AI development is widely perceived as highly automated, much “ghost work” underpins modern innovations in machine learning and generative AI models. It investigates how copyright law facilitates corporate control over data works, disenfranchising the diverse and precarious labor forces critical to AI development. The analysis extends to analogous inequities that screenwriters and performing artists face, drawing parallels to emphasize the shared struggles across creative industries.
The paper investigates how existing private ordering mechanisms, recognized by copyright law, typically assign rights and economic advantages to AI designers or corporate proprietors rather than those performing the underlying tasks, exacerbating the invisibility and marginalization of digital workers’ contributions. It concludes by highlighting the need for reconfiguring copyright law to equitably recognize collaborative authorship and calling for solutions to address ongoing fairness concerns, including contractual reforms and broader labor protections. It envisions intellectual property law as a tool for dismantling systemic inequities, foregrounding human dignity and collective stewardship in the digital economy.

India’s ambition to lead genomic advances and precision medicine led to the conjunction of patents and precision medicine. The race-specific claims in the patent domain, as noticed in the USA, may have a chilling effect in India, given its diverse population groups. The issue of diversity in genetic datasets globally resonates with its relevance in India nationally. Since the precision medicine-patent law interface involves the control and use of genetic and genomic data, it leads to a contesting debate of data colonialism and data sovereignty. Many suspect that the patenting of precision medicine may widen India’s economic, social, and cultural disparities by creating new groups. The critical race theory (CRT) relating to IP in the United States may not have direct application in India, and it may need contextualization, given India’s diverse ethnic, social, and cultural population groups. Nevertheless, the gaze of CRT into the Indian patent system can help uncover the latent systemic bias and discriminatory or non-inclusive practices that may go against India’s mission to ‘Make in India’ and its progression into the ‘Invent in India.’ CRT could be extended to accommodate the intersectionality of colonialism, neocolonialism, nationalism, marginalized class, and social justice to decipher the structural asymmetry of India’s patent system and analyze the implications of patent-precision medicine interplay in India.

Should human genetic materials (HGMs) be considered inalienable or private property? The debate is still ongoing. With their rising commercial and clinical value, most common law jurisdictions use Eurocentric property principles to grant private property rights over HGMs. Scholars have called for moving away from a property framework for regulating HGMs, but there needs to be further exploration into the justifications. My paper aims to demonstrate that dominant property approaches to HGMs cause tangible harms and create clear winners and losers. Through descriptive and distributional analyses, I will show the (mis)distribution of entitlements and how the perpetuation of existing systemic inequalities mean that marginalized communities, especially Indigenous and racially minoritized individuals (IRMIs), are disproportionately affected. Eurocentric property principles underlying patent and intellectual property rights have justified third-party claims over IRMIs’ genetic materials while denying their rights to self-determination and ownership. I hope that outlining these tangible harms would incentivise a meaningful and effective reform in the legal framework on human genetic patents.

In IMAGINATION: A MANIFESTO (2024), Ruha Benjamin urges us to unshackle our imaginations from their self-imposed as well as external constraints, and to co-create different outcomes than those resulting from the libertarian logic of so-called masters of the universe who dominate racial-techno-capitalism. The world we want (rather than the one that is being forced upon us currently) depends upon our insistence on technologies that are cut loose from over-reliance on hyper-individualism and excessive corporate profits as the primary drivers of progress. Rather, we can act, create, develop, and deploy technologies based on our care for each other, drawing from cultural capital in the form of practices of non-dualistic and collective thinking, thereby not replicating existing relationships of dominance and subordination.

Generative AI poses an existential threat to creators some say, while others tout AI as a great force for “democratization” of creative spaces, and an “equality machine.” This article posits that if past is prologue, generative AI poses the greatest threat to hyper-creative but historically exploited marginalized communities, specifically African American creators. AI, like American society is plagued by systemic racism in a technological environment that is a paradigmatic “white space” with demonstrated racial animus. Against a backdrop of IP doctrine and law with structural hostility to Black cultural production, AI proponents claim of a race-neutral panacea seem hysterically dubious.

Internationally renowned contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama has spent her career contending with the concept of infinity through her prolific artwork and writing, using her emblematic polka dot motifs to create works that draw on autobiographical, and biological themes, by offering cosmological perspectives into the sublime. This project examines one of the latest instances in an established pattern of objectification and representation by considering the two blockchain networks, “Kusama” and “Polkadot,” which are closely linked to the roots of Web 3.0. While the use of Kusama’s name may be an obvious act of appropriation, and a likely IP infringement, it represents an appetizing target because it functions as a sexualized techno-orientalist trope, possessing a currency which reveals the deeper channels of how media representation corresponds to the pulse of neo-colonial capital pathways. By prioritizing anti-colonial and intersectional analytics, this predicament enables us to consider the ways in which our art and culture markets discretely enable libertarian ideals. More importantly it exposes the stakes of epistemic violence and the agency of art to confound behemoth global systems.

To begin, although bell hooks rightly problematized the modern “obsession with power and domination,” properly abolishing that attitude will require a full understanding of its origins. To that end, the oeuvre of Palestinian scholar Wael Hallaq offers among the most thorough analyses of the historical wedding of human knowledge to colonial power. In Restating Orientalism, Hallaq argues that ugly features of the colonial world, namely genocides and planetary collapse, are the logical consequences of idolizing man’s Ego (that is, European man) over all other forms of knowing, especially indigenous and scriptural, but also musical, communal, botanical, and even magical. For Hallaq, the result of this reductive process is “epistemic sovereignty” which, to be fully appreciated, requires that we recall epistemology describes the properties & working of the intellect, an entity shared by every human, but whose habits & clarity of perception differ widely. Indeed, the narrative I am calling a “historiography of Science” will foreground the logical “organon” of Aristotle as a civilizational resource for intellectual insight into the natural world, the human being, and everything in between. What perplexes and plagues our present age is an epistemological distortion, or, as the intertwining histories of race, capital “property,” and imperialism make abundantly clear, the consequences of a politically-driven decoupling between the human brain and spiritual heart-center, leaving only the so-called “individual” made of artificial “mind” and bodily “machine.” This occurred through systematic destruction of Aristotelian metaphysics by the likes of Descartes and Francis Bacon, whose sickly model of personhood as something confined “within the skull” remains hegemonic today. For to be a colonizer requires that one’s heart is banished from his thinking and being, as one cannot do violence to the world without first being disconnected to it, to himself, to and “the Other.” I would argue the essence of this decoupling can be adequately appraised (and hopefully treated) by first revisiting the dialectical afterlives of Hellenistic Greek philosophy in Catholic Europe and Asian Islam. Then, with the greater worldviews at play in mind, we can examine the birth of “intellectual property” law in Venice, and indeed modernity’s very understanding of itself amidst the “Crusading Spirit” of the West and its military technologies. Indeed, ‘Abd al-Hakim Murād warns that AI, the latest “Manhattan Project,” is an apotheosis of Occidental ratio, a discourse engine with violent tendencies identified by Vyas and Gupta’s critique of academic writing. We could say that “Artificial” intelligence symbolizes the epistemic sovereignty indoctrinated through public culture; it seems providentially appropriate, then, for the deep spirituality of the Orient, a generally heart-based method that re-integrates the body with supra-rational faculties of psyche and intellect (or, if one prefers, the “quantum field” and “consciousness” of theoretical physics). In noting the colonial borders imposed between heart and mind, we are grasping at the very roots of the problem. Thereafter, I suggest Islamic metaphysics can, if deployed on its own “subaltern” and often poetically Ishmaelite terms, illuminate and revitalize the inherent inter-connections between all Reality, demonstrating the ultimate vanity of obsessive power & domination. This is the way of the “inner eye,” an organ through which we can rediscover the Oneness of Being and the motive force of Love, both sources of solidarity needed to vanquish all false sovereigns, bigoted nationalisms, and divisive forms of evil. There is much to consider here, and all of it part of advocating a truly moral and practical vision for healthy living in the 21st century.

TBD

Contemporary counter-culture movements such as Black Lives Matter, engage in iconoclasm of colonial artefacts situated in a public space to oppose a narrative emanating from the city. Significantly, in the contemporary age, this manner of protest opens the door to social media activism. Consequently, a discussion around their interaction with copyright law considering whether the system facilitates or comes to the behest of such movements. This paper, focusing on citizens’ right to interact with and roam in public spaces will explore the ways in which both moral and economic rights are biased against counter-culture protest and ought to be altered in the context of public spaces to facilitate such movements. In addition, this article will provide a more democratic legal approach to public art and the narratives emanating thereof. Specifically, it will explore the hierarchical nature of moral rights, as well as the lack of an objection to the destruction of work as highly problematic in allowing and protecting the activities of counter-culture protestors. Moreover, the lack of commitment to an all-encompassing freedom of panorama will be demonstrated, to argue that its limitations are outdated in regulating interactions with public spaces on social media, directly hindering these movements.

This paper seeks to critically assess whether the copyright laws adopted by developing English-speaking Commonwealth countries are fit for purpose and if not, how should the copyright framework be reshaped to better account for the realities of such countries. Historically the development of copyright laws in the Commonwealth was guided by international treaties and the jurisprudence of the former colonisers, namely, the United Kingdom. As a result, the copyright laws that have been imposed on developing Commonwealth countries do not necessarily reflect their needs and realities. Therefore, the paper will conduct both post-colonial critique and TWAIL (third world approaches to international law) analysis to determine the shortcomings of the existing international and domestic copyright law frameworks, and in response, propose a more functional, fair and sustainable approach that better represents the interests and needs present in developing Commonwealth countries. The consequence of this paper is a starting point for developing Commonwealth countries to challenge the existing international copyright treaties and domestic copyright law frameworks. It is proposed that copyright law should be more inclusive and representative of the diverse interests that exist beyond the perspective and realities of developed countries.

In 1878, Queen Liliʻuokalani, the last sovereign monarch of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, wrote a song in celebration of her niece’s birth. This Article presents a case study of an attempt to determine the song’s copyright status, a journey that became an exploration of the history of copyright itself in the Hawaiian Islands. Though the song is well known throughout the Hawaiian Islands and has been recorded, distributed, and performed many times, its copyright status is exceedingly difficult to determine and could even be protected through 2047. This study demonstrates how copyright doctrines can make public domain material inaccessible and unusable, undermining a key goal of copyright. More fundamentally, the history of this song sheds new light on copyright law’s role in American imperialism, and its relationship to Native Hawaiian and indigenous cultural heritage and traditional cultural expressions more broadly. This study contributes to scholarship focusing on how to safeguard indigenous cultural heritage and traditions and prevent misappropriation, and further explores the additional question of how copyright should recognize and honor norms within indigenous communities about individual and collective use of the community’s cultural heritage.