Affirmative Debater's Guide to The 2024-2025 Intellectual Property Topic
My initial thoughts for next year's topic on the AFF
What’s Happening?
Resolved: The United States federal government should significantly strengthen its protection of domestic intellectual property rights in copyrights, patents, and/or trademarks.
Back in January the above was announced as the topic that high school debaters will spend an entire year debating for the 2024-2025 school year. As of now, juniors are still focused on fiscal redistribution. But, lucky for those of you looking for a head start, I’m not coaching for the current school year. So, in my curiosity, I’ve spent the past few weeks researching the upcoming topic in anticipation of returning to the activity after a prolonged break.
My preliminary thoughts will follow but the headline is this: I’m excited.
Preston Stolte, author of the Intellectual Property topic paper1, astutely identified that “intellectual property rights has NEVER been chosen as a policy debate topic” for high school. Typically, high school policy debate will rotate between domestic and foreign topics so that students are able to experience a variety of issues that influence multiple audiences similar to what we see with Foreign and Domestic Extemp. Contrastingly, collegiate debate offers a third topic category: legal. Throughout the years, these topics have been both foreign (2018-2019) and domestic (2014-2015). The introduction of legal topics offers students the opportunity the legal lens through which to view the implications of their plans. This adds another layer of texture that we haven’t explicitly seen in previous high school policy topics which makes it all the more interesting.
In the following article, I want to break down some of the core issues that I’ve found interesting for affirmative teams to help guide student’s research before they head off to camp in the hopes that the rounds I hear at the start of the seasons aren’t garbage.
There are three potential affs for next year’s topic: copyrights, patents, and/or trademarks. From a cursory glance at my research I’m assuming that the latter-most will be reserved for smaller affirmatives and that patents will be the primary source of contention. I’ll be splitting this section into three pieces covering all three areas though, so if you’re only interested in one (you shouldn’t) feel free to peruse like you’re at the mall.
Copyrights
“Copyright is a type of intellectual property that protects original works of authorship as soon as an author fixes the work in a tangible form of expression.”2
The most interesting legal case I’ve seen for this part of the topic has been Naruto v Slater3. It involves a monkey (named Naruto4) finding a photographer’s (Slater5) phone and proceeded to take multiple selfies with it. This sparked a legal battle with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Ultimately, it was determined that Slater was the owner of the copyright, and that Naruto was not.
This case is interesting for multiple reasons: 1) for the policy folks, there are myriad implications for how this impacts AI and its legal autonomy; and 2) there is the more critical side that can argue for how we view non-human subjects in the legal space.
Additionally, there are myriad cases where copyright issues can foster interesting debates surrounding how we view and interpolate art. The first thing that should come to mind is sampling laws which disproportionately affects hip-hop. This is an industry that is ripe for debate.
Patents
“A patent is an exclusive right granted for an invention, which is a product or a process that provides, in general, a new way of doing something, or offers a new technical solution to a problem…”6
This is where we’re going to see a majority of policy affirmatives. In my mind, this section could be a topic in and of itself and there would be enough literature to spare. But, the comedic rule of threes persists so here we are. Biotech, AI, and even IR theory primarily revolve around this portion of the topic. For the most part, we’ll be seeing affs that make the assumption that patents are key to innovation and that will resolve any variety of impacts.
In the United States, we’ve seen myriad ways in which our existing patent system has been abused. Patent trolling has been an infamous example and could be a key source of contention for many debates which we’ll get into later. But, I think that affirmatives will find that strengthening IP rights will solve for these issues. In any case, there’s a debate to be had.
Trademarks
“A trademark is a sign capable of distinguishing the goods or services of one enterprise from those of other enterprises.7
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’ve done the least research into this portion of the topic. It’s reminiscent of the 2013-2014 topic about economic engagement with Cuba, Mexico, or Venezuela. Venezuela had the smallest literature base and was relegated to smaller affs but towards the end of the season was almost non-existent. I predict that will be the case here. But, I’ve been surprised before.
For this portion, most of what we’ll see might relate to 1st amendment rights. While some might make the argument that trademarks secure economic opportunities for companies I don’t think that’s as strong of an argument as for patents so econ teams will be better suited elsewhere.
Concluding Thoughts
Patents feel more central to the topic than copyright or trademark and from that I feel like this topic leans itself more towards the tech industry which, given my background, is more interesting to me.
However, copyrights seems to have some interesting internal link stories that I’ll be interested to see as people delve more into their research.
Trademarks are in a weird spot. Everything I’ve seen about their benefits in my research has fed into either patents or trademarks in more interesting ways. This makes justifying a big-stick trademarks aff difficult. I absolutely see this portion of the topic reserved for smaller break-affs in elims.
Overall, I think that there’s interesting potential for the affirmative this year. While certain factors may be initially limited due to a lack of creativity that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist, and, certainly have the opportunity to flourish. I’m excited to see what comes from everyone’s work over the summer and into the season opener’s.
https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:48e5fa2f-8eed-3267-803e-7eea74cbc4a4
https://www.copyright.gov/what-is-copyright/#:~:text=Copyright%20is%20a%20type%20of,a%20tangible%20form%20of%20expression.
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/16-15469/16-15469-2018-04-23.html
As an aside, great name
Not as great of a name
https://www.wipo.int/patents/en/
https://www.wipo.int/trademarks/en/