CLSC | Socio-Legal Studies Workshop: Nicholas Towns - "America's Oldest Intellectual Property"

Abstract
Culture is, at its core, ideas, transmitted across generations through media like food, music, clothing, and stories. In our modern legal system, where individuals own concepts, what happens when one people find that their culture has become the intellectual property of another? This work explores corporate America's relationship with intellectual property law and its impact on Black ownership of culture. The deprivation of agency in producing food and the inability to perpetuate culinary traditions can cause one to approach their culture not as something they create, but something they passively purchase. Similarly, the lack of ownership of one's traditional clothing and music pervert their roles in culture, equating signifiers of heritage with those of wealth and promoting a culture based upon buying itself from others. Without owning one's cuisine, music, and dress, they cannot own their stories, and thus, their identity. Much of the blame for this lies on intellectual property law, which has been consistently used against Black America, preventing ownership of the very culture they create. With this in mind, one must ask, "who owns Blackness?"