Commodity Culture, Private Censorship, Branded Environments, and Global Trade Politics: Intellectual Property as a Topic of Law and Society Research
A. Sarat, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Law and Society (Malden, MA: Basil Blackwell) pp. 369-391, 2004
24 Pages Posted: 9 Jul 2014
Date Written: 2004
Abstract
Intellectual Property has become a rich topic of interdisciplinary inquiry in the past 15 years, attracting the interest of anthropologists, communications and cultural studies scholars, economists, geographers, historians, traditional legal scholars, political scientists, sociologists, and philosophers. Not all of this scholarship addresses the role of intellectual property in actual social contexts, however, and a great deal of it is both hypothetical and abstract. Scholarship on intellectual property that represents a "law and society" approach is explored here through dominant themes in the literature. Briefly, these include the effect of intellectual property rights (IPRs) in shaping communication, the exercise of IPRs as a new form of social power, the spatial politics of branded environments, the cultural power of fame afforded to celebrities, global inequities occasioned by the emergence of trade-based intellectual property protection for informational goods, and a concern with the fate of the public domain in this new information economy.
Keywords: Intellectual property, Law and society
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