Namaskar,
As June bade farewell, so too did the season of conferences—a rumoured rite of passage in the European academic circuit. Around this time last year, I wrote about my experience of ATRIP in Rome. This year, I return not from Rome, but from Madrid, where I had the pleasure of attending ISHTIP—the 16th Annual Workshop of the International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property. Unlike most IP gatherings where doctrine reigns supreme, ISHTIP is a curious creature. For it especially emphasises IP history and theory, tickling scholars to think in terms of IP’s genealogies, ghosts, and grammar.
In this post, I do two things: briefly share my experience and what I presented, followed by how it prompted me to think further about Indian IP law, opening a research agenda of sorts.
What’s ISHTIP?
As per its website, ISHTIP “promotes and supports scholarly investigation of the national histories of patent, copyright, and “related” rights; the diverse “roads not taken” in the evolution of these legal structures; contemporary countertrends; and the laws and norms that have been devised in non European cultures around the world to manage intellectual production and exchange.” Be sure to check their website if you haven’t—there’s some cool content there!
With “Intellectual Property and Capitalism” as this year’s theme (PDF), the event unfolded over two intense days of critique, camaraderie, and, of course, caffeinated conversations in the Spanish capital. The 16th edition was held at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
The event features two types of presentations: one by doctoral students and the other by professors. Here comes a unique part of the conference, which was the format for senior scholars’ papers. Instead of the author presenting, a designated commenter presents a summary and critique of a paper to invite an interdisciplinary discussion. The commentator typically concludes with a few questions that the author responds to, providing a brief context along the way.
What We Presented: The Concept of IP-sciousness?
I was a part of the first panel of the first day, where my co-author and great friend from KU Leuven, Belgium, Leander Stähler, and I shared our ongoing work on the history and structure of IP-consciousness. Titled “Taking IP Rights Too Seriously: On the Construction of IP-Sciousness,” our paper attempts to trace the emergence and legitimisation of intellectual property (IP) especially copyright law, not simply as a body of legal rules (e.g., minimum standards of protection), but as a political and epistemic project that began in the late 19th century, that has become increasingly normalised over time, and producing similar patterns of thought in novel technological contexts. This normalisation, we posit, was not achieved solely through legal provisions; it was also enabled by the creation of knowledge infrastructures—institutions, discourses, and other mechanisms of legitimacy—that came to shape how we think and talk about ownership, information, creativity, and knowledge.
We take the Berne Convention—the first international treaty on copyright—as the chief site of investigation to explore whether the current almost-reflexive application of proprietary logic across diverse domains of information is incidental, or a result of a carefully curated IP-consciousness—“the mental framework and thinking pattern that underlie acts of approaching and dealing with IP issues.” Drawing on archival sources and institutional practices, we aim to understand how this consciousness—the way we experience information regulation—was formed, shaped, and internalised over time. Yet, IP-consciousness, we believe, might not suffice to describe the present condition, one shaped by a neoliberal knowledge economy.
For one, IP law, especially copyright, has evolved beyond a regulatory framework into a technology of power that subjectivises us in terms of how we know, value, and relate to information itself. To mark this shift, we introduce IP-sciousness: not just a state of knowing about IP, but a condition of being known through it. Drawing from William James’s notion of sciousness—pure, unmediated experience—we use the term to describe the intuitive and affective internalisation of proprietary logics. IP, here, becomes not just a regulatory tool but a very condition of our thought. We exemplify our claim using the debates on AI and Data governance.
Needless to say, almost every paper has an interesting idea to think about. Sadly yet unsurprisingly, while the representation of Global South scholars (particularly India) was nigh nought, perhaps due to the self-run nature of the ISHTIP society, with no fees charged from presenters or funding provided to them. There was one interesting paper by Prof. Ali Malik (from the University of Oregon) titled “Assetization, Rentierism, or Something Else? Assessing the Relations Between Intellectual Property, Capitalism, and the Datafication of Agriculture in India”.
Overall, the conference, I’d say, was intellectually stimulating and very relevant to scholars working or wishing to work in the areas of IP theory and practice. One of the conference’s strengths was its close-knit format. Since all sessions took place in the same space with a limited number of attendees, it was possible to be part of every conversation and connect with almost every participant—a rarity at academic conferences. A shoutout to Professors José Bellido and David Pretel for their support of our project, for organising such an engaging event, and for kindly granting us an extension to submit our working draft (much appreciated!).
What’s Next?
As stimulating as ISHTIP was, it left me wondering: Whither Indian IP history? And, more importantly, what even is Indian IP history?
Attending ISHTIP, a thought occurred to me—something that had also come to mind while working on the SpicyIP Open IP Syllabus—there is a need to engage more seriously with the histories of different branches of Indian IP, beyond the usual focus on patents or copyright. Each of these branches must be thoroughly examined to open richer conversations about how IP has evolved in India, not just doctrinally, but also ideologically and institutionally.
There is no gainsaying that some historical research has been done in adjacent areas now increasingly intertwined with IP, such as the print press, cultural production, and education systems. However, a comprehensive history of IP law in India remains lacking. And for that, we need to ask questions like What makes IP law feel normal, inevitable, or even necessary? And how has this ‘feeling’ taken hold across institutions, practices, and publics?
Answering this might require opening up two distinct but related lines of inquiry.
First, the history of IP law itself—how particular doctrines and statutory frameworks emerged, evolved, and were contested. For example, one might want to explore the history of fair dealing or compulsory licensing in India by examining case laws and legislative debates.
Second, the history, or perhaps, genealogy of IP thinking—the conceptual and ideological frames through which IP law (or the areas it governs today) has been imagined, justified, and debated at different points in time. Additionally, what makes our current thinking around copyright law possible or legible in the first place? Here, (e.g.), instead of fair use directly, which allows copying as an exception to the author’s right, one would investigate the history of literary traditions, or translations in India and the concept of copying (or quotation or borrowing) therein. And how and whether proprietary frames have overwritten the earlier ‘ways’ of governing and producing knowledge in this region, which now goes by the name India? Put otherwise, was there or could there have been any Indian thinking regarding knowledge production? Given the diverse literary culture and practices, which is one facet of knowledge production, it seems unlikely. However, the question can be taken as a hypothesis, at least. Here, G. N. Devy’s “The Crisis Within: On Knowledge and Education in India” can be a helpful read in this context.
This inquiry would prompt us to move beyond a purely legal archive and into a different ideational terrain (or even oral archives, if I may), where we can understand the very conditions (and limitations) of our IP thought that have come to feel natural, shaping our understanding of IP’s function and legitimacy today.
While speaking of this, I particularly think of India’s copyright law, where most historical accounts remain focused on legislative developments, particularly post-1957, when India enacted its first independent copyright statute. While this is undoubtedly a critical juncture, we must also attend to the more complex histories of how the very idea of copyright—and more broadly, IP—with its particular proprietary logic—came to be circulated (and by what means and manners) in Indian society by the time it gained political independence in 1947. Speaking of early IP law, I must mention Prosanto Kumar Sen’s 1922 long monograph, “The Law of Monopolies in British India Book by in India,” an insightful, though largely ‘forgotten’, source that engages with early conceptualisations of IP and monopoly in India. I vehemently believe that it deserves renewed scholarly attention.
Conclusion
In other words, we need to move beyond the much-bandied binaries, such as access vs. incentive, right vs. exception, author vs. public, and so on, and ask deeper historical and genealogical questions, such as, What were the dominant frames of IP thinking at different moments in India’s past? What kinds of discourses—legal, political, moral—were deployed to regulate or govern information? How did colonial priorities/legacies, nationalist struggles, and global economic pressures shape them? What imaginaries of knowledge, ownership, and authorship existed? And what alternative frames—discarded, suppressed, or forgotten—might we recover today?, etcetera.
To do so, we need to open up to bold, genealogical—and dare I say, even archaeological—projects in Indian IP history. That is, projects that look not merely at what the law says, but at how and why law has been made to mean what it does. This means moving beyond doctrinal zones, toward the much trickier terrain of intellectual and institutional histories where law meets language, where policy blurs with politics, and where the past is never quite ‘the’ past. (Shivam Kaushik attempted something on these lines, here)
In simple words, what we need, then, is nothing short of a historiographical rewilding of Indian IP thought—a return to the root (if any), but also a restless (re)search for the “roads not taken” as ISHTIP reminds us.
In the coming weeks, I plan to further elaborate on and exemplify this research agenda, particularly the distinction between the history of IP law and the history of IP thinking—a distinction I find increasingly important to articulate, given the growing debates over AI and IP.
Until then, see you.
Thanks to Leander Stähler, Shivam Kaushik, and Swaraj Barooah for their comments on the draft.