As I have long argued, intellectual property represents a neglected dimension of the global structures affecting equity and redistribution, and I welcome a new volume dedicated to this essential nexus of law and justice, The Cambridge Handbook of Intellectual Property and Social Justice edited by Steven Jamar and Lateef Mtima. Although maintaining a general focus on intellectual property and social justice topics arising in the context of the United States, the volume includes a valuable section on “Intellectual Property Social Justice in Global Perspective” focusing on gender and development disparities. Featuring chapters from Zehra Betul Ayranci, J. Janewa Osei-Tutu, Mariana Bernal Fandiño, Marcela Palacio Puerta, and Metka Potočnik, Jamar and Mtima provide scholars of intellectual property and social justice one of the most important resources to date on how the control of access to innovation, images, and compositions both exacerbates inequality but also how those same intellectual property protections maybe restructured to ameliorate it.
This book is one I like a lot, and I hope others active in the study and shaping of intellectual property do as well. It is perhaps the most comprehensive volume on the juxtaposition of intellectual property and social justice—many scholars including myself analyze the socially beneficial and pernicious effects of current intellectual property approaches, but far fewer characterize them in such a specific way. Jamar and Mtima and their contributors have offered novel and creative recommendations to advance social justice through intellectual property. Indeed, Madhavi Sunder brings this point home in a particularly compelling way in her chapter on Intellectual Property After George Floyd.
Two examples are illustrative. In Jan Osei-Tutu’s chapter on Intellectual Property, Social Justice, and Human Development: Empowering Female Entrepreneurs Through Trademark Law, she identifies how trademarks can be used to boost the vast, often informal, economic sectors run by women, especially women who own small businesses. Marcela Palacio Puerta provides a similarly insightful lesson about how civil society advocates can shape the implementation of intellectual property provisions of bilateral trade and investment agreements, often aiming to increase IP protective floors above multilateral trade agreements like TRIPS. Using the U.S.–Colombia Free Trade Agreement copyright provisions, she shows how copyright provisions can be adapted to advance social justice objectives even in agreements that are at best indifferent and often hostile to doing so. She argues that provisions ultimately adopted provide more socially equitable access, inclusion, and empowerment opportunities for users, the general public, and other groups beyond the narrow economic interests of rightsholders (although she concedes those remain robustly protected)
The book is divided into seven sections covering critical areas of intellectual property social justice inquiry. The editors and contributors cover themes, institutions, and IP categories including the special roles of libraries, artificial intelligence, and the growing role of the user and the individual as traditional forms and protections bend in light of both innovation and the demands of the vulnerable and those advocating on their behalf.
Jamar and Mtima have undertaken a valuable exercise in using this volume not only to map the pressure points where social justice advocates are making gains in traditional IP categories, but to expose the ways in which conventional social utility analysis and justifications are giving way. As intellectual property becomes the battle ground for the modern economy and global political centers of power, Jamar’s and Mtima’s volume, and along with it their contributors, will be a go-to resource for those assessing how to move forward with such rapid and contemporaneous change.
