Unfortunately, the vigorous lobbying of huge corporations has made the idea of intellectual property go imperial; it seems to have conquered the world. To accept the notion of cultural appropriation is to buy into the regime they favor, where corporate entities acting as cultural guardians “own” a treasury of IP, extracting a toll when they allow others to make use of it. This isn’t to say that accusations of cultural appropriation never arise from a real offense. Usually, where there’s a problem worth noticing, it involves forms of disrespect compounded by power inequities; cultural
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