Some more equal than others: critical contexts for the (false) promises of intellectual property rights

As public policy tools for development, intellectual property rights (IPRs) regimes are state derived instruments that are said to generate necessary incentives for cultural production, invention, and meaning making with the promise of economic gains through the grant of exclusive rights and the attendant regulation of markets. While subjects are formally equal under the law, there is exclusivity to such rights with discriminatory distributive effects and disparate harms within and among nations. Substantive equality makes law and policy reform of domestic and international IPRs regimes imperative, though any remediation may be seen as pressure valves at best for faulty colonial property regimes that are ostensibly neutral. Examining the oft neglected socio-political context in which people live and create (some in adverse relation to and recognition by the state), can show how the baseline of equality in nationality and citizenship - the belonging to a state and as its beneficiary - assumed in IPRs regimes may prove illusory in patents, copyright, and trademark law, as some are more equal than others. This chapter maintains that when assessing the capacity of such instruments to meet global institutional objectives, as with the SDG 10 commitment to reduce inequalities within and among countries and UN 2030 Pledge to start with the most behind first, cultural, and socio-political contexts are critical to understanding the role and limits of IPRs, but so too for empowering people in the demand for change towards the eradication of all forms of inequality.