Social Life of Intellectual Property : Justice, Patents, and Care

This open access book argues that Intellectual Property''s meaning and value flows from its circulation as an idea, not just from legal rights.

This ''social life'' of Intellectual Property (IP) moves between being normatively defined, socially constructed, institutionally embedded, and conceptually practiced across legal, scientific, commercial, and political fields. These processes are ubiquitous and shape relations of recognition, distribution, and exclusion.

If knowledge is power, the ownership of knowledge shapes the world. The Covid pandemic, for instance, revealed how a particular interpretive commitment to IP led to the unequal provision of vaccines; a predictable outcome of private ordering premised on the system’s implied fairness.

At a time when every conceivable type of information can be owned and turned to value, from marine life to data recognition patterns, the world we inhabit is enmeshed with IP. This book therefore seeks to transform our understanding of IP as a world-constituting force, by linking justice to who and what we care about (''just care''), as we reckon with a planet in peril.

By bringing together bodies of scholarship rarely placed in conversation with each other, the book offers new conceptual resources for scholars working at the intersection of IP law, global governance, and social theory;including circulation of IP, implied justice, the private ordering function, natural legality, and just care.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.