IP Regime Authorship

ip-regime-authorship measures structural power over the rules of intellectual property — who sets the global regime of what is patentable and enforceable, and who can wield IP as an instrument of exclusion. The structural question is: who writes the IP rules others must abide by, and can enforce exclusion through them? — not how many patents a country holds. A patent count is innovation output (possession); the IP regime is the structural lever.

Strange singles out the patent system itself as a foundational instrument of knowledge-structural power — the legal machinery of exclusion, not the stock of inventions:

• "patent laws secured monopoly rights for technical innovation through the institution of intellectual property rights" (Strange 1994, p.125) — IP as a deliberately-built state power instrument.
• "the producer used the protection of the state, under patent laws, to prevent competitors stealing his invention" (Strange 1994, p.133) — IP as the legal instrument of exclusion.
• the denial lever: structural knowledge power lies in the capacity "to deny the access of others to a kind of knowledge respected and sought by others" (Strange 1994, p.30) — a patent is literally a state-granted denial of access.
• IP-protection framed explicitly as access-denial: with the patent route weakening, "the corporation can no longer depend on the state and therefore has to develop its own means for denying others access to the knowledge it has gained" (Strange 1994, p.133) — the patent regime's entire function is denial of access.
• the quantification caution: knowledge-structure power is "unquantifiable… The indicators that can be found are only the roughest of guides" (Strange 1994, p.119) — patent counts are exactly such rough indicators, not the structure.