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The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans Anjali Vats Stanford Univ. Press (2020)
In July 1999, representatives of Amazonian Indigenous groups arrived at the headquarters of the US Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Virginia, to challenge a patent on the ayahuasca vine. Indigenous peoples had cultivated ayahuasca for its medicinal and other properties for generations. How could someone in the United States have ‘invented’ it?
This might seem like cultural miscommunication, or the past meeting the future. But this year’s wake-up call to the ravages of social injustice are a reminder that this was also about racism and power. Many people are trying to address systemic biases in science and technology through training, grants and better job pipelines for researchers from marginalized groups. But the tentacles of racism are institutional, embedded and endemic.
In The Color of Creatorship, law scholar Anjali Vats focuses on how racism has shaped intellectual-property systems. Patent, copyright and trademark laws and policies have, she argues, imagined whiteness and creatorship as synonymous while consistently devaluing the ingenuity of people...