Intellectual property, biological property, and cultural property refer to a set of complex issues of considerable contemporary significance. Current international debates about the sequencing of human genes, the development of the internet, the preservation of cultural
heritage, the protection of biodiversity, artificial intelligence, and the development and patenting of new crops and new drugs, all involve, in one way or another, questions of intellectual property.
This course will examine recent anthropological contributions to debates about intellectual property which have been part of a renewed anthropological interest in property more generally.
Anthropologists have added to discussions of intellectual property by questioning the cross-cultural applicability of Euro-American concepts of property which are based on culturally and historically specific conceptualisations of social persons, objects, and the
relationships between persons and objects. They have also questioned ideas about creativity which are central to legal definitions of intellectual property, and they have documented the effects of increasingly globalised intellectual property regimes (such as
the Paris and Berne Conventions and the more recent World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property) on local, and often disempowered, communities.
This course will consider anthropological work on property in general and will deal with aspects of intellectual property such as culturally-specific concepts of ownership, ideas of the commons and the public domain, the objectification and appropriation of indigenous heritage, and effects of the internet and global flows of information on persons, privacy and the ownership of ideas. It will end with a consideration of arguments against intellectual property and ideas about alternatives to intellectual property.