The SAGE Handbook of Intellectual Property

Multi-disciplinary in its scope and global in its sweep, The SAGE Handbook of Intellectual Property represents the state-of-the art in scholarship around this important and rapidly growing area. It is essential reading for all researchers, students and policy-makers who are interested in the transformation of culture and capitalism in the global age.

In the fraught political economy of IPRs the legal perspective is too often privileged to the cost of exploring its wider social, political and ethical impact. This new handbook offers a guide to a wide range of issues situating them in a context that while legally informed engages with many other dimensions of making knowledge into property. Correcting for the exclusive focus on the legality of patent, copyright and trademark, the handbook offers an excellent example of the plurality of foci that are required to understand the social, political and economic role of intellectual property. The concentration of the legal dimension has been criticised for many years but now the range of those critiques is available in one volume and as such this volume will be an invaluable resource to those seeking to understand why intellectual property has become so central to the debates about the future of the global political economic system.