About Us
Illustration by Zoran Svilar
Who we are
Abolish IP is an independent collective of scholars, lawyers, and artists seeking to transform how our creativity enters the economy, to ensure it does so as a tool against oppression.
We work with creators, knowledge producers, activists, and organizations committed to social and climate justice to deploy innovative strategies of intellectual property (IP) in liberatory projects.
We call ourselves abolitionists because we see the current structures that govern creativity as unjust, exploitative, and complicit with other structural injustices. And like other abolitionists, we are less interested in simply eliminating and more in imagining what else could be. In the words of the abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "Abolition is about presence, not absence. It's about building life-affirming institutions."
AbolishIP is a school for creators to occupy their creations and put them together in service of the worlds we want to create. To use our creativity to build life-affirming institutions.
Contact us
info@aboliship.org
Public Engagements
"Abolitionist Creativity." Presentation at RACE + IP '23 conference, University of Pittsburgh School of Law, April 2023.
"Locating Racial Justice in the Psychedelic Patent Conversation." Conversation hosted by Chacruna Institute. January 2022.
Residency at ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL), Summer 2020.
Artists in Residence at Pro Arts Commons. Oakland, California, 2020-2021.
"The Political Economy of Intellectual Property." Course taught in Spring 2022 at IE University, Madrid, Spain.
"Digital Rights & Abolitionist IP." A digital town hall hosted by Team CommUNITY (TCU), a community-based membership network of digital defenders.
"Democratizing Knowledge." A webinar hosted by the Arab Reform Initiative on what is at stake in attempting to democratize knowledge production in the Arab world.