João Romeiro Hermeto is a Brazilian-Italian scholar. In Brazil, he studied engineering and then economics at the Universidade de São Paulo. During the upheavals of the financial crisis, he worked with derivatives credit risk management for an investment bank from 2007 to 2011 and subsequently founded a company that produced and promoted art and culture. In 2013, he emigrated to Europe, studied philosophy and culture, and earned a doctorate in philosophy at the Universität Witten/Herdecke. His research focuses on Marxism and the ontology of the social being, on the critique of political economy, and on the critique of knowledge production – ideology and intellectual property.
Description:
Based on his new book of the same name (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2024), João Romeiro Hermeto will address some historical developments of intellectual property. He asks what is ‘knowledge’ under capitalism, and how is it created and appropriated?
Developments such as digitalisation and the convergence between big pharma and tech giants are bringing about transformations in social property relations. What are the conditions of intellectual property creation today? What theoretical assumptions does it make? Under what social relations is intellectual property produced?
The emphasis will not be on individual cases or symptoms but on the overarching logic: the logic of capitalism as revealed in intellectual property.
