Madhavi Sunder – författare

Intellectual property law plays a pivotal role in ensuring that luxury goods companies can recoup their investments in the creation and dissemination of their copyrighted works, trademarked logos, and patented designs. In 2011, global sales for luxury goods reached about $250 billion, and consumers in East and Southeast Asia accounted for more than 50 percent of that figure. The rapid expansion of the market has prompted some retailers to wield intellectual property against the influx of imitators and counterfeiters. The Luxury Economy and Intellectual Property comprehensively explores the rise of the luxury goods economy and the growing role of intellectual property in creating, sustaining, and regulating this economy. Leading scholars across various disciplines critically consider the industry, its foundational intellectual property laws, and the public interest and social concerns arising from the intersection of economics and law. Topics covered include defining the concept of luxury, the social life of luxury goods, concerns about distributive justice in a world flooded by luxury goods and knockoffs, the globalization of luxury goods, and the economic, social, and political ramifications of the meteoric rise of the Asian luxury goods market.

Most scholarship on intellectual property considers this law from the standpoint of law and economics. Under this conventional wisdom, intellectual property is simply a tool for promoting innovative products, from iPods to R2D2. In this highly original book Madhavi Sunder calls for a richer understanding of intellectual property law’s effects on social and cultural life. Intellectual property does more than incentivize the production of more goods. This law fundamentally affects the ability of citizens to live a good life. Intellectual property law governs the abilities of human beings to make and share culture, and to profit from this enterprise in a global Knowledge economy. This book turns to social and cultural theory to more fully explore the deep connections between cultural production and human freedom.

This volume chronicles a quarter-century of feminist theorizations on equality and liberty. The essays demonstrate a continuing commitment to feminist method (a democratic notion that all people have a right to participate in the production of knowledge of the world, including legal knowledge) and manifest feminism's continuing critical tradition (namely, theorists' willingness to see multiple factors, including feminism itself, as obstructing enlightened constructions of the world). Taken together, the essays suggest that liberty to make the world is not just a means to an end - equality - but is a substantive end in itself.

This volume assesses the role of intellectual property in pandemic times through lessons learned from COVID-19. Authored by an international roster of experts, chapters diagnose causes for the inequitable distribution of lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines and offer concrete suggestions for reform. From delinking vaccine development from monopoly rights in technology, to enhanced legal requirements under national and international law for sharing publicly funded technologies, to requiring funding from rich nations to former colonies to build local vaccine manufacturing capacity in low and middle-income countries (including those in Africa), this work highlights timely IP reforms that prepare us for the next pandemic. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.