Conclusion to Expropriation by Law

The concluding chapter returns to the book’s main contributions, in particular the precise analysis of IPRs’ financialization and patents, which are linked to the multiplication of their collectively recognized uses over the course of history. This financialization renders invisible the corporate appropriation of workers’ know-how. The conventions for valuing IPRs have transformed the conventions for allocating the fruits of innovation further upstream. It accompanies the emergence of an intellectual capitalism largely sustained by the intermediaries of IP law, who increasingly operate at the global level. These lawyers contribute more generally to the legal instrumentation of economic relations and to the expropriation of workers’ know-how and whose production is increasingly organized along global value chains and via digital platforms dominated by the GAFAs. Finally, the role of these global lawyers is examined against the backdrop of emerging IPR attribution conventions and their eventual regulation, to re-balance working relationships and encourage the pooling of knowledge and know-how.