The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans

Abstract

Despite formal distinctions among its three main categories—copyright, patent, and trademark—intellectual property is a meaningful umbrella, as rhetorics about creation, ownership, theft, just rewards, and stolen value flow across legal boundaries, inseparable from racial scripts of white supremacism and colonialism, as Anjali Vats shows in The Color of Creatorship. Vats traces a historical trajectory of U.S. intellectual property legislation and case law through three periods: a period of formal and explicit racial differentiation from the republic’s founding through the mid-twentieth century; the race-liberal period of formal colorblindness from the mid-twentieth century through the early twenty-first; and the purportedly postracial period of the Obama presidency. Despite the erasure of explicit legal mandates for white supremacy in the latter two, Vats demonstrates the persistence of racial hierarchy in the conception and application of intellectual property, offering case studies of forms of resistance and calling for a decolonization of creatorship.

Key Words:

• Decolonization
• Critical Legal Studies
• Critical Race Theory
• Intellectual Property
• White Supremacy