Intellectual property rights and the political economy of culture

The domain of intellectual property rights, along with the regulations that govern them, has a steadily, almost visibly incremental bearing these days upon the ordinary lives of people across the globe, in the rich world and the poor and in the North and the South. Its influence has escalated to the point where for some it may mean the difference between life and death; on it are now founded industries in the first rank of corporate power and thrust. As a modus for wealth creation it is being transferred onto other previously unthought-of sectors outside the familiar orbit of the market: indigenous cultural forms, music, fabric and other designs, symbols, artefacts, knowledge of natural resources, dance steps, motifs, advertising catch phrases, logos and brand names … Once this was disregarded as no more than a rather obscure and quite boring part of general commercial law, left to a few specialists. Not so today. Intellectual property right law and regulations are a focal concern, not only for lawyers and businesspeople, but also in pivotal debates about development and political economy. Yet despite this pervasive impact, few people, lawyers included, have much knowledge or understanding of the real implications of intellectual property rights. Very few seem to take these implications seriously and, indeed, intellectual property rights issues are far more likely to be regarded either as being of no real significance or simply as signalling regulations that exist merely to be broken. Misconceptions abound about how it often affects central, crucially important developmental issues and the debate that does ensue is often full of misinterpretations and ideological preconceptions. A measure of the poverty of general public comprehension here i