This issue aims to assess the state of claims over intangible forms of property, which have been expanding in recent decades enabled by Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property and other international conventions. The articles examine the nature and limitations of intellectual property law and related property-like claims over intangible products and expressions, and present cases from the expanding margins of intangible property provisions including analyses of how these trends are playing out in the Global South and in areas outside of intellectual property law. The contributors show how both expansions of intangible property provisions and resistances to these expansions increase the terrain of experience that is enclosed by proprietary claims and suggest alternative strategies for responding to the contemporary intangible property regime.

Despite remaining the most iconic and highly valorized metrical technology of the entire, now globally universalized, project of zoological and botanical taxonomy, very little attention has been given to highlighting the pivotal role that type specimens also play in constructing and disciplining contemporary relations to living property. Building on my earlier work on the relationship between biological classification and regulation,1 this article provides an overdue analysis of this technology's significance in introducing deposition, priority of publication, and authorship as the key conceptual and functional mechanisms not only of taxonomic classification, but also of the ascendant system for prosecuting rights to ownership of biological novelties in the contemporary era: the Euro-American system of intellectual property law.

This article analyzes how intangible cultural expressions are re-scripted as national intellectual and cultural property in postcolonial nations such as Indonesia. The mixing of intellectual and cultural property paradigms to frame folkloric art practices as national possessions, termed “intangible property nationalism,” is assessed through consideration of Indonesia's 2002 copyright law, UNESCO heritage discourse, and the tutoring of ASEAN officials to use intellectual and cultural property rhetoric to defend national cultural resources. The article considers how legal assumptions are rebuffed by Indonesian regional artists and artisans who do not view their local knowledge and practices as property subject to exclusive claims by individuals or corporate groups, including the state. Producers' limited claims on authority over cultural expressions such as music, drama, puppetry, mythology, dance, and textiles contrast with Indonesian officials' anxieties over cultural theft by foreigners, especially in Malaysia. The case suggests new nationalist uses for heritage claims in postcolonial states.

This article documents the practices of pharmaceutical creativity in Ayurveda, focusing in particular on how practitioners appropriate multiple sources to innovate medical knowledge. Drawing on research in linguistic anthropology on the social circulation of discourse—a process called entextualization—I describe how the ways in which Ayurveda practitioners innovate medical knowledge confounds the dichotomous logic of intellectual property (IP) rights discourse, which opposes traditional collective knowledge and modern individual innovation. While it is clear that these categories do not comprehend the complex nature of creativity in Ayurveda, I also use the concept of entextualization to describe how recent historical shifts in the circulation of discourse have caused a partial entailment of this opposition between the individual and the collectivity. Ultimately, I argue that the method exemplified in this article of tracking the social circulation of medical discourse highlights both the empirical complexity of so-called traditional creativity, and the politics of imposing the categories of IP rights discourse upon that creativity, situated as it often is, at the margins of the global economy.

The 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage specifies that communities are to be full partners in efforts to safeguard their intangible cultural heritage. Yet the notion of safeguarding has been complicated by the politics and mechanisms of digital circulation. Based on fieldwork in British Columbia and Thailand, I show that community-based productions of multimedia aimed at documenting, transmitting, and revitalizing intangible heritage are productive spaces in which local cultural property rights discourses are initiated and articulated. I argue that digital heritage initiatives can support decision making about the circulation—or restriction—of digital cultural heritage while drawing attention to the complexities of safeguarding heritage in the digital age.

This article suggests three critical inquiries for formulating a feminist analysis of patent law. The first questions how patent law functions as a strategy within neoliberal, biopolitics. The second examines how patent law is structured through biopolitical techniques of governance by examining two conceptions of the public domain I call open public domain and protective public domain. The third inquiry, drawing upon feminist science studies, asks how women's reproductive and intellectual labor are valued and devalued in various different ways through new patent law technologies. In addition, two recent patent law are struggles are examined. These include an American Civil Liberties Union case against the patenting of breast cancer gene sequences and Southern African San struggles against patents related to the Hoodia gordonii plant. In conclusion, I argue that patent law functions within gendered and ethno-racialized forms of neoliberal, biopolitics involving the patenting of women's reproductive and intellectual labor within new bioeconomics.

The experience of the indigenous communities regarding access and benefit sharing under the national regimes based on provisions of Convention on Biological Diversity and Bonn Guidelines has not been satisfactory. The communities expect that noncommercial values should be respected and misappropriation should be prevented. Some academics and civil society groups have suggested that traditional knowledge commons and biocultural protocols will be useful in ensuring that while noncommercial values are respected, access and benefit sharing takes place on conditions that are acceptable to the communities. This proposal is examined in this context in the larger context of access and benefit sharing under the Convention on Biological Diversity and implementing prior informed consent principles in access and benefit sharing. This article examines knowledge commons, provides examples from constructed commons in different sectors and situates traditional knowledge commons in the context of debates on commons and public domain. The major shortcomings of traditional commons and bicultural protocol are pointed out, and it is suggested that these are significant initiatives that can be combined with the Nagoya Protocol to fulfill the expectations of indigenous communities.

This essay examines theories of value and property in relation to conceptions of morality, correct comportment, and their influences on Afro-Bahians subject to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century cultural heritage initiatives in the Pelourinho neighborhood of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. This urban space is the nation's most expressive site for the performance of Afro-Brazilian identity and the commemoration of tradition. In analyzing the role of morality in Pelourinho-based cultural property-making, I focus on popular critiques of heritage discourse to argue that, in conjuring a particular form of cultural heritage that bears a distinct resemblance to UNESCO's immaterial patrimony programs, the Bahian state has piggybacked on social scientific evaluations of local people's moral comportments in order to put together an archive of everyday life that exists as a standing reserve for histories of Brazil and the marketing of cultural heritage. This data produced in an effort to regulate the historical center has revolved around the state's evaluation of the moral probity and everyday habits of the Pelourinho's overwhelmingly Afro-Brazilian populace. The result is a conceptualization of cultural labor that emanates not from the capacities and struggles of producers, but from a decentered or distributed view of production, which I tie to the existence of this archive. Consumers, or visitors to the historical center, as well as historical archives thus play a critical role in this form of constructing property and understanding the sources and fungibility of labor in a global economy for multicultural difference that depends on an emphasis on futurity and market reflexivity.

Scientific plagiarism is as sui generis as the author function in science. A study of the specificity of scientific plagiarism and the ways in which it diverges from appropriation in other disciplines allows us to question traditional definitions that focus on the copying of published copyrighted materials. The form of plagiarism that is most damaging to scientists does not involve publications, is largely outside the scope of copyright law, and is unlikely to be detected by textual-similarity algorithms. The same features that make this kind of plagiarism difficult to identify and control also provide a powerful window on the unique construction of authorial credit in science, the problems of peer review, and the limitations of plagiarism surveillance technologies.