[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":3,"doc-seo-663403-105":59,"doc-detail-663403-en":130},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"success",[7,13,18,23,28,33,38,43,48,51,55],{"id":8,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":10,"show_sort_weight":11,"slug":12},1,"Document","Story & Novel",90,"story-novel",{"id":14,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":15,"show_sort_weight":16,"slug":17},2,"Literature",80,"literature",{"id":19,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":20,"show_sort_weight":21,"slug":22},4,"Exam",70,"exam",{"id":24,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":25,"show_sort_weight":26,"slug":27},5,"Comic",60,"comic",{"id":29,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":30,"show_sort_weight":31,"slug":32},6,"Technology",50,"technology",{"id":34,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":35,"show_sort_weight":36,"slug":37},7,"Healthcare",40,"healthcare",{"id":39,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":40,"show_sort_weight":41,"slug":42},8,"Research & Report",30,"research-report",{"id":44,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":45,"show_sort_weight":46,"slug":47},9,"Religion & Spirituality",20,"religion-spirituality",{"id":46,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":49,"show_sort_weight":46,"slug":50},"World Cup","world-cup",{"id":52,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":53,"show_sort_weight":52,"slug":54},10,"Lifestyle","lifestyle",{"id":56,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":57,"show_sort_weight":24,"slug":58},19,"General","general",{"code":4,"msg":60,"data":61},"ok",{"site_id":62,"language":63,"slug":64,"title":65,"keywords":66,"description":67,"schema_data":68,"social_meta":123,"head_meta":125,"extra_data":127,"updated_unix":129},105,"en","patents-as-capitalist-aesthetic-forms","Patents as Capitalist Aesthetic Forms","","Analyzes patents as cultural signs whose meanings exceed their legal and commercial functions, intensified as a political and economic controversy during the Covid-19 pandemic. Contrasts “Drop the Patents” activism with institutional promotion of IP as essential to innovation, asking how an abstract legal form acquires life-or-death associations. Proposes that law-driven enclosure enables migration of IP forms into social and cultural contexts, shaping ideology and legitimacy through aesthetic signification.",{"@graph":69,"@context":122},[70,84,105],{"@type":71,"itemListElement":72},"BreadcrumbList",[73,77,79,82],{"item":74,"name":75,"@type":76,"position":8},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":78,"name":9,"@type":76,"position":14},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/",{"item":80,"name":40,"@type":76,"position":81},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/research-report/",3,{"item":83,"name":65,"@type":76,"position":19},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/patents-as-capitalist-aesthetic-forms/663403/",{"url":83,"name":65,"@type":85,"image":86,"author":91,"headline":65,"publisher":94,"fileFormat":97,"inLanguage":63,"description":67,"dateModified":98,"datePublished":99,"encodingFormat":97,"isAccessibleForFree":100,"interactionStatistic":101},"DigitalDocument",{"url":87,"@type":88,"width":89,"height":90},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/patents-as-capitalist-aesthetic-forms/663403.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":92,"@type":93},"kopisore","Person",{"url":74,"name":95,"@type":96},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-10-29","2026-10-28",true,{"@type":102,"interactionType":103,"userInteractionCount":8},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":104},"ViewAction",{"@type":106,"mainEntity":107},"FAQPage",[108,114,118],{"name":109,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":111},"Why are patents described as having contradictory life-or-death associations beyond their legal meaning?","Question",{"text":112,"@type":113},"Because public and institutional discourses around IP, especially during Covid-19, generate interpretations that cannot be explained by legal, sociological, or economic causes alone; the meanings appear to exceed patents’ formal legal and commercial functions.","Answer",{"name":115,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":116},"What does the article propose about how patents become signs of cultural economy?",{"text":117,"@type":113},"It argues that interdisciplinary scholarship often treats IP forms as migrating into social and cultural contexts, and that law–society–culture dynamics shape and stabilize legal-economic meanings; patents become cultural signs through how their signification works.",{"name":119,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":120},"How does the “cultural turn” in critical theory relate to the article’s approach?",{"text":121,"@type":113},"The article links its focus to the cultural turn that examined aesthetics and mass media as legitimizing forces for economic rationality, using this background to argue that cultural forms also act as political and economic strategies that furnish law with legitimacy.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":124,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":126,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":128,"site_id":62},663403,1793227284,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":131},{"doc_id":128,"user_id":132,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":133,"doc_module":4,"category_id":39,"category_name":40,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":134,"file_id":135,"file_url":136,"file_type":137,"file_size":138,"view_count":8,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":139,"language":140,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":141,"faqs":142,"seo_title":143,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":129,"read_time":144},962090880963,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_6f874abed73319feea01a86fa6f0fab8","Patents as Capitalist Aesthetic Forms  \nHyo Yoon Kang1  \nAccepted: 1 June 2023 © The Author(s) 2023  \n‘Myth is not the classless longing of a true society, but the objective character of the alienated commodity itself.’  \nAdorno in his letter to Benjamin, 1935, in Aesthetics and Politics, p. 125  \n‘The worn out state of a myth can be recognized by the arbitrariness of its signification.’  \n-Barthes, Mythologies, 1972, p. 127  \nThe phenomenon of patents as a cultural sign appeared acutely as a political and economic problem during the Covid-19 pandemic. As debates about intellectual property (IP) law’s effects on access and distribution of Covid-19 vaccines reached mainstream newspaper front page (Williams et al. 2021), there were increased public relation campaigns about the vital necessity of IP for ‘innovations’ in the life sciences (PhRMA 2021) . In 2021, a battle for public opinion was raging around the proposal to waive IP protection on medicines and technologies needed to combat the Covid-19 pandemic at the World Trade Organization. At the same time, in a parallel discourse, patent offices and organizations were continuing to promote patents as essential ingredients of an ‘innovation’ journey. As civil society organizations and members of public carried ‘Drop the Patents’ signs on symbolic coffins in demonstrations against Covid-19 vaccine IP on 12 October 2021(Fig. 1), a few days earlier, the World Intellectual Property Organization celebrated IP in the latest James Bond film release with the slogan: ‘No Time to Die for Global Creators and Innovators’(Staines 2021; Fig. 2) .  \nHow does a patent—an abstract legal form—accrue such contradictory associations with life or death beyond its legal meaning? Such conflicting discourses cannot be adequately explained by references to legal, sociological, or economic causes alone; patents seem to have acquired meanings that exceed their legal or commercial uses.  \n* Hyo Yoon Kang [hyo-yoon.kang@warwick.ac.uk](hyo-yoon.kang@warwick.ac.uk)  \n1 Warwick Law School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK  \n1 3  \nFig. 1 Parliament Square, London, 12 October 2021. Author’s own  \nFig. 2 @AndyWIPO Twitter, 8 October 2021 (Staines 2021)  \nPerhaps IP law’s rapid and extensive private enclosure of what were previously public or non-commodifiable objects may explain the migration of IP forms to other social and cultural contexts. In this vein, much of interdisciplinary scholarship of intellectual property law have adopted a critical tenor (Biagioli, Jaszi, Woodmansee  \n2002) . They have analyzed and critiqued the expansive commodification of cultural expressions, knowledge practices, and of everyday lifeworlds (Coombes 1998 ; Dutfield 2000 ; Drahos and Braithwaite 2003 ; Bowrey 2005, 2020 ; Macmillan 2006, 2022 ; Bellido and Bowrey 2022) . This direction of dynamics—the colonization of social and cultural domains by law driven by economic rationality—continues to remain of concern. My focus in this article is different and is on the other direction of law-society-culture dynamics: the question of how cultural forms shape and stabilize legal-economic forms and their meanings. I want to probe and examine how patents have become signs of cultural economy and how their signification shapes the ideology of intellectual property.  \nCritical theory’s cultural turn of the 1980s and 1990s examined the role of aesthetics and mass media for legitimizing economic rationality, and a distinct field of a Marxist cultural economy emerged from it (for example, Hall 1983/2016; Jameson 1991) . Paul du Gay’s characterization of Stuart Hall’s Hard Road to Renewal (1988) encapsulates the importance of cultural economy as showing ‘how the discursive, or meaning, dimension is one of the constitutive conditions for the operation of economic strategies. That the “economic”, so to speak, could not operate or have “real”effects without “culture” or outside the meaning or discourse.’ (2000, p. 113) . In legal scholarship, th","cbCaimMze13uj5V5","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaimMze13uj5V5","pdf",2732130,31,"English","# Introduction\n## Covid-19 and IP controversies\n## Patents beyond legal meaning\n# Framework and argument","[{\"question\":\"Why are patents described as having contradictory life-or-death associations beyond their legal meaning?\",\"answer\":\"Because public and institutional discourses around IP, especially during Covid-19, generate interpretations that cannot be explained by legal, sociological, or economic causes alone; the meanings appear to exceed patents’ formal legal and commercial functions.\"},{\"question\":\"What does the article propose about how patents become signs of cultural economy?\",\"answer\":\"It argues that interdisciplinary scholarship often treats IP forms as migrating into social and cultural contexts, and that law–society–culture dynamics shape and stabilize legal-economic meanings; patents become cultural signs through how their signification works.\"},{\"question\":\"How does the “cultural turn” in critical theory relate to the article’s approach?\",\"answer\":\"The article links its focus to the cultural turn that examined aesthetics and mass media as legitimizing forces for economic rationality, using this background to argue that cultural forms also act as political and economic strategies that furnish law with legitimacy.\"}]","Patents as Capitalist Aesthetic Forms | PDF",78]