Access to knowledge (A2K) is the ‘newpolitics of intellectual property’ that seeks to fundamentally realign and reform intellectual property law.
Author
Mili Joy Baxi, Lecturer, Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana, India
Summary
In the long-running tensions between Human Rights Law (HRL) and Intellectual Property Rights Law (IPR), the author is introducing the conceptual placement of Access to knowledge (A2K) movements.
Access to knowledge (A2K) is the ‘newpolitics of intellectual property’ that seeks to fundamentally realign and reform intellectual property law. It is difficult to draw a commonality between an activist protesting for waiving patents on HIV+ medicine and Covid-19 vaccines and a subsistence farmer or a software programmer. A2K politics offers a perfect balance of freedom and control that the IP and HR debate are trying to find.
This analysis is relevant because it seeks to investigate two conceptions; one is to understand the relevance of the access to knowledge movements in the IPR – Human rights debate. There is no clear discussion wherein normative examination of this kind has been undertaken.
Second is, viewing the solutions to human rights issues caused by IP or caused to due scarcity or governance issues, resolved through IP. Although the concept draws from existing debates, it departs on some conceptual level from the available framework on IP and human rights.
Published in: Journal of Intellectual Property Rights (JIPR)
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