1. Patent Grip: The Marketplace Making of Patent Law's Subjects
- Author
-
Hopper, Benjamin Robert and Hopper, Benjamin Robert
- Abstract
This work demonstrates that the grip of patent laws has to do with the development of market relations. It contrasts the core of patent law, namely, the concept of “invention”, with that epistemological form often cast as the defining “other” of invention, namely, the concept of “traditional knowledge” (TK). It finds that patent law protects a specific form of “invention”, namely, a discrete unit of commodifiable knowledge with certain characteristics that developed in reciprocity with the development of capitalist markets for intellectual things. The corollary is that those more ensconced in capitalist markets will more likely share patent law’s epistemology. Taking this insight, the work develops a theoretical framework to explain patent grip. At this framework’s core is the thinking of Soviet legal scholar, Evgeny Pashukanis, that law is contingent in the sense that it expresses underlying social relations. The development of a market for a given intellectual thing is connected with the development of a commodifying attitude to that thing in which people more readily perceive it, or additions and modifications to it, as a propertisable “invention” rather than some other form of knowledge. Thus, it is hypothesised that more commodity-oriented people are more likely to use and obey patent law, i.e., to have higher patent grip. This work tests this hypothesis using a case study of the extent to which, in southwestern China’s Guizhou province, TK-knowers, namely, traditional medical knowledge (TMK) practitioners, use and obey patent laws in respect of TMK. The case study involves a social survey of 53 mostly ethnic minority TMK practitioners, capturing, inter alia, measures of individual commodity-orientation (also called marketisation) and patent grip. Case study analysis finds: (i) statistically significant correlations between a TMK practitioner’s commodity-orientation and their patent grip; and (ii) a TMK practitioner’s commodity-orientation affects their treatme
- Published
- 2023