Introduction: Breaking Free from Private Control over Knowledge

Chapter 1 provides a roadmap to the book’s central ideas and an overview of the main topics discussed. Moreover, it also situates intellectual property within a contemporary dimension. For instance, the material conditions of knowledge production endure a transformation as digitalisation distresses existing social property relations. However, the effects of intellectual property do not remain confined within the digital economy. Instead, the privatisation of knowledge by means of intellectual property comprises multiple industrial sectors. This process accentuates an existing antagonistic contradiction of the capitalist mode of production, namely, the social character of production and its private appropriation. Additionally, this chapter brings awareness to the qualitative difference between the method of investigation based on dialectical materialism and intellectual property theories.