Who Owns Knowledge? BioBattles and TechnoStrife in Latin America

Who owns knowledge? Who owns science? At first glance, the questions seem ridiculous: How can anyone own the store of facts about the world and ways of doing things that people, individually and collectively, keep in their heads? It turns out that what we really mean when we ask this question is "who will have the right to control the circulation of knowledge?" and, even more importantly, "who will have the right to benefit from it?" Answering this question takes us into the seemingly arcane realm of copyright and patent law and what has come to be called "intellectual property." But, as the contributors to this issue of the NACLA Report show, questions of "intellectual property" have very real effects.