ABSTRACT
Politics has become a vital part of discourse over intellectual property law if we are to judge simply by an increase in book and article titles (a trend of which this book happily takes part). 1 Despite its recent popularity, the use of the term “politics” in patent law has been accompanied by a certain amount of imprecision. In my early thinking on this subject, I preferred a defi nition originated by James Boyle in 1997. Boyle claimed that copyright activism needed an organizational strategy similar to that of the environmental movement of the 1960s in the United States. The environmental movement, contended Boyle, consisted
1 The subject of a “politics” in intellectual property works is quite diverse and incorporates a signifi cant inter-disciplinary content. Important works include The Politics of Intellectual Property: Contestation over the Ownership, Use, and Control of Knowledge and Information (Sebastian Haunss and Kenneth C. Shadlen eds., 2010) (collecting a range of articles related to the emergence of political models within the context of knowledge information); Rosemary Coombe, “The Expanding Purview of Cultural Properties and Their Politics,” 5 Ann. L. Rev. Law. Soc. Sci. 396 (2009) (contending that proliferating claims related to cultural property may indicate changing political relationships of indigenous peoples to national, regional and international authorities); Amy Kapczynski, “The Access to Knowledge Mobilization and the New Politics of Intellectual Propery,” 117 Yale L. J. 804 (2008) (employing the Access to Medicine mobilization as a key explanatory moment in the framing of intellectual property discourse); Michael P. Ryan, Knowledge Diplomacy: Global Competition and the Politics of Intellectual Property (1998) (analyzing the negotiations, associated with TRIPS, utilizing the complex-interdependence model common to international relations).
