ABSTRACT
In the context of public health and access to medicines, it is necessary to identify the contributors to the colony of intellectual property. The intellectual property system has often been taken to account for much more than what is proposed by a commercial law framework, including ethical oversight. Important opportunities for addressing crisis lie in this relationship between the lifeworld of users and the intellectual property system. Representative of an economic and social class, life chances manifest in the opportunities for access to and possession of goods. The health of the individual and that of society are mutually constitutive: 'Dramatic differences in the health and life chances of peoples around the world reflect imbalance in the power and prosperity of nations. When applied to products in the field of medicine and public health, the rules of intellectual property and the business models built upon those rules raise various issues.
