The Social Life of Intellectual Property: Justice, Patents, and Care

This open access book argues that the scarcity created by the under-production of vaccines during the Covid-19 years was an entirely predictable, even legitimate consequence of how the international patent system works.

Far from being a technical sub-discipline of intellectual property law that simply protects inventions, the international patent system is prismatic of the ways in which we fail to adapt to the challenges of our times: patent rights are intended to incentivise innovation for societal benefit, but in fact facilitate predictable injustice. The patent system ignores the care-constituted nature of our lives, prioritising limiting notions of fairness at the cost of structural harms.

The Social Life of Intellectual Property proposes an ethic of just care to temper justice in the global governance of technology. It explores intellectual property as recurring social processes and explains why individual agency and shared responsibility are implicated.

On an ecologically imperilled planet, and in a time between pandemics, we must reckon with what we are socialised to believe is legally possible.