Has copyright law in the United States ever aided discrimination on the basis of race, or exploitation of or prejudice against racial minorities? Copyright legislation in the United States has never explicitly incorporated racial categories. No federal or state copyright statute has ever withheld copyright protection from authors of a particular race, or imposed different fees on authors or owners of different races, or otherwise explicitly used racial categories. Neither, as far as I know, has any judicial decision concerning copyright law ever explicitly discriminated against a racial minority.

Intellectual property (IP) and social justice as a critical intellectual movement has come of age. This volume builds on more than two decades of work at the start of the twenty-first century by founding scholars who explored the human rights obligations and other social justice dimensions of the IP regime,1 and introduces new voices who take as their starting point that IP law is deeply implicated in structuring national, racial, gender, and other inequalities.2 The volume represents significant accomplishments. First among those is the recognition that IP rights do far more than the utilitarian economic theories that dominated twentieth century IP scholarship proposed. The old view of IP rights as narrow tools to incentivize the optimal production of creative goods is incomplete.3 Today scholars recognize the myriad ways that IP rights affect not only efficiency in innovation markets, but also human rights, including access to education4 and healthcare;5 freedom of speech;6 and distributive justice.7

Colombia’s process of implementing the copyright provisions of the United States–Colombia Agreement (U.S.–Colombia FTA) illustrates the importance of nonrightsholder advocate interest groups, including among others tech-users, software engineers, scholars, free speech advocates, and academics in achieving intellectual property social justice (IP-SJ) by balancing the interests of intellectual property rights (IPR) holders and the interests in equitable access, inclusion, and empowerment of other affected groups. In a country where economic interests have dominated the content of IPR law, especially copyright law, without regard for the law’s impact on the interests of others, the active participation of representatives of nonrightsholder interest groups makes a critical difference. For the first time in the literature, this chapter describes the implementation process of the U.S.–Colombia Free Trade Agreement copyright provisions, highlighting the impact of advocacy by representatives of nonrightsholders and academics in achieving a more balanced copyright system that is in accord with IP-SJ theory. The provisions ultimately adopted provide more socially equitable access, inclusion, and empowerment opportunities for users, the general public, and other groups beyond the narrow economic interests of rightsholders, which are nonetheless still strongly protected.

This chapter examines China’s role and approach in the reforms of global financial governance. It investigates both the reforms of the traditional Bretton Woods institutions that the United States dominates, and the initiation and development of the new financial institutions that China leads, including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the New Development Bank (NDB) and the Multilateral Cooperation Center for Development Finance (MCDF). It finds that China, by walking on two legs, commits to correcting and improving the unsustainable elements of the existing world order, rather than decoupling from it. The success of China’s multilateralism lies in its advocating for the principle of ‘extensive consultation, joint contribution, and shared benefits’, its adherence to high and feasible standards, and its use of a teleological perspective in legal interpretation. As a major driving force behind Chinese multilateralism, China needs to maintain the image of a self-restrained and benign power in international cooperation, while being assured that only an appropriate norm-taker makes a respected norm-maker.

Extensive land borders and complex historical issues have brought a series of territorial disputes to the People’s Republic of China since its foundation in 1949. Over the past decades, China has settled land-boundary issues with twelve of its fourteen land neighbours, covering more than 90 per cent of the entire length. Nevertheless, territorial disputes between China and India remain a serious challenge, and China must consider how to mitigate and resolve the island issue with some Southeast Asian countries, including Vietnam and the Philippines, in the South China Sea and the dispute with Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. China’s approach to settling territorial disputes is characterized by its preference for bilateral negotiations and its argument based on the ‘customary line’. The vision of creating a harmonious regional/international environment to achieve the policy goal of ‘peaceful rise’ is likely to prompt China to continue and increase its use of international law to settle its disputed border issues, which is also in line with its high priority goal of maintaining domestic stability.

The doctrine of state immunity occupies a contentious space in China’s contemporary approach to international law. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) insists on the doctrine of absolute immunity: Chinese courts cannot exercise jurisdiction over a foreign state without its permission, nor can foreign courts exercise jurisdiction over the PRC without its consent. This position contrasts with the doctrine of restrictive immunity, which holds that domestic courts may hear a limited number of cases against foreign governments that engage in commercial activity or seize foreign-owned property. In maintaining the absolute position, China clings to the traditional view. However, recent overtures suggest that China may begin a shift, made by many other countries, towards the restrictive theory. Ultimately, this chapter is agnostic as to whether China should adopt the restrictive theory.

In the contemporary global society, intellectual property (IP) is the coin of the realm. As the product of human minds, hearts, and souls, IP is perhaps the most valuable natural resource of the information age. Equipped with the knowledge of what IP is, how important it is in daily life, and how the rules work, anyone can harness IP to empower themselves and their communities.

This chapter investigates the interaction between China, under the guidance of the principle of ‘ecological civilization’, and international environmental law through case studies on two selected issue areas that are at the forefront of future international environmental lawmaking: biodiversity conservation and global ocean governance. The chapter first examines China’s legal efforts on biodiversity conservation. Given that China hosted for the first time the Convention on Biological Diversity’s 15th Conference of the Parties in 2021 and 2022, the chapter pays particular attention to China’s role in the negotiation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework – ‘a new global biodiversity framework to guide actions worldwide through 2030, in order to preserve and protect nature and its essential services to people’. The chapter then focusses on China’s participation in two of the latest negotiations of global ocean governance – biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ) and the Mining Code in the deep seabed. It concludes with some suggestions regarding how China could possibly act towards a desirable future for a thriving planet for nature and human beings.

This chapter critically examines the People’s Republic of China’s engagement with international trade law from the perspectives of rule-taking and rule-making, including China’s pre-reform planned economy-based trade regime, its voluntary internalization of global trade rules in the decade before its World Trade Organization (WTO) accession, trade reform to comply with WTO rules, the China–US trade war (in violation of international trade law) and the Chinese position on WTO reform. It argues that, in its reform and opening-up period (1978–present), China has largely been a rule-taker and a responsible – albeit possibly reluctant at times – status quo power in the United States-led, West-dominated international economic system. On the other hand, it has also taken an instrumentalist approach to international trade law with a foreign trade policy pragmatically oriented towards achieving a balance between trade liberalization and protectionism based on calculated uses of industrial policy tools and non-tariff barriers to support selected domestic industries.

Trademark regulation in many countries contains provisions that prohibit the registration of marks that are disparaging, scandalous, immoral, or offensive to a group of people in society. In the European Union (EU) and in the Andean Community, trademark regulations also deny registration of trademarks that are contrary to public policy or good manners. In the United States of America, immoral, disparaging or scandalous trademarks were banned as well according to the federal trademark statute, but in 2017 and 2019 the United States Supreme Court held that those limits violated the United States Constitutional First Amendment right of Freedom of Expression.1

This chapter examines China’s differential approach vis-à-vis developing and developed countries in advancing its normative agenda on non-weaponization in outer space before the Conference on Disarmament and the UN General Assembly. Pursuant to the logic of the democratization of international relations, China has gained the majority support of developing countries for its agenda around their commonly shared values of peace and development and through other forms of functional cooperation in their outer space activities – increasing its international legitimacy in their eyes. Conversely, China has yet to gain the trust of technologically advanced – developed – nations in order to give its future regulatory framework governing peaceful relationships in outer space its much-needed normativity. Instead, past disarmament efforts in outer space during the Cold War can guide China’s norm-entrepreneurship where it must seek consensus among the major space powers, the United States in particular, on the basis of trust. Without such a fertile soil, however, any rules on the prevention of an arms race in outer space cannot take root.

A trade secret is any economically valuable information which provides an actual or potential competitive advantage to the owner of the information because the information is secret.1 Trade secret protection can be an important driver of innovation, inclusion, and empowerment. But legal protection for trade secrets can also undermine those interests if the protection granted is not properly balanced by other interests such as employee mobility and the ability to build on existing information. A distinguishing feature of trade secret IP is that the essential bargain which underlies utilitarian innovation as embodied in patent law – the grant of a monopoly to exploit the patent for a limited time in exchange for making the information public2 – is not present.

Global health law has been a focus of debates since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. This chapter examines global health law in the face of Covid-19, with the focus on China. It answers the accountability question and finds that China has fulfilled its obligation of notification under the World Health Organization (WHO) International Health Regulations 2005, yet the current international health governance is facing great challenges. The chapter argues that international cooperation should be a duty under the global health law, and therefore that more effective global health governance should be in place, especially with a binding mechanism to ensure a global response strategy in case of a future public health crisis.

For as long as there have been works, there have been fanworks – works made by people who feel so passionately about something that they want to discuss it, make new things about it, and join with others who feel similarly about it. Fanworks are often described in the Internet age as kinds of “user-generated content.” Because anyone can make them, share them, and experience them, fanworks provide uncommonly powerful opportunities for expressive empowerment, access, and inclusion. In addition, fanworks are uniquely well suited to advancing social justice by using well-known sources to highlight injustices; and the affinity groups that surround fanworks carry special potential to empower creators and act as sites of progress. At the same time, fanworks have a tense relationship with intellectual property (IP) doctrine and enforcement: fanwork creators are authors in their own rights, but because fanworks build upon pre-existing material, they can also run afoul of actual, perceived, or threatened copyright and trademark risks. This chapter addresses those potentials and precarities. It explores the relationship between fanworks, social justice, and law to highlight how, by providing avenues for access, inclusion, and empowerment, IP doctrines that encourage fan endeavors also advance the goals of IP social justice (IP-SJ).