From Ownership to Trusteeship: Archival challenges to the imagination of Intellectual Property

The global rise of intellectual property has sought to universalize not just an international regime of property jurisprudence but seeks to fundamentally alter the way we imagine the relationship between knowledge and property. Archivists have come under considerable strain as they encounter IP systems. This paper looks at the encounter of archives with copyright and argues that archivists can offer a new ethics of thinking of the relationship between knowledge and property moving beyond ideas of ownership and exclusion.