ABSTRACT
The most egregious examples of the distilled instrumentalization of intellectual property are to be found in so-called copyright and patent "trolls," companies that manufacture no product, perform no service, but rather exist to secure creative assets and, moreover, police the creative industries for potential infringements. Although Landes and Posner do not link intellectual property with corresponding legal rights per se, for our purposes, it is worth unpacking just how "property" functions. The term "intellectual property" appears at least as early as the 1860s in England, when inventors and other specialists employed it to argue that legal protections should be given to new discoveries and technological advancements in the same way that creative expressions are granted protection through copyrights. The litigious environment surrounding much of hip hop, as just one indicator of the corporate efforts to secure culture as private property for rent, takes on a further ominous tone when we zoom out and consider intellectual property on a global scale.
