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s, while American consumers continue to import large quantities of foreign goods—for example, more than 70% of the goods sold at U.S. Walmarts in 2004 were made in China--(data from the AFL-CIO)—American firms make huge profits from licensing scientific, technological, and cultural products to overseas interests. More than 50% of U.S. exports are now intellectual property-related. American military power itself becomes an essential part of ensuring America’s control over trade in intellectual property and trends in global trade policy that benefit the U.S. and other Western countries relative to underdeveloped nations. Powerful corporate lobby groups like the Intellectual Property Committee have made it their mission to increase corporate control over intellectual property through their influence over negotiations at the World Trade Organization, recent rounds of which have concentrated on services and intellectual property. Defenders of these rights argue that such protection is necessary to ensuring that creators of new ideas are rewarded; otherwise, cultural and intellectual workers will have no incentive to produce and innovation will die. Perelman counters that most of the profits never get to the people actually create the ideas, but rather go to the corporations who employ them and who the shareholders who own the companies. While Perelman argues that inventors and creators deserve compensation for their work, patent and copyright ultimately ends up profiting companies rather than people, shifts the profit focus of these companies from manufacturing and service to the easier profits in IP, and robs the culture of its vitality and intelligence. Perelman closes his chapter on discouraging terms, arguing that the future of the Western economies is one potentially characterized by unproductive and inhumane activities (p. 43): “The way that the current regime of intellectual property rights is unfolding leads us to expect that the ultimate result of the continued expansion of intellectual property rights will be an economy dominated by secrecy and litigation. Technical progress will be stunted, while intellectual property rights distort the economy in ways that disadvantage all but the fortunate few.” e. creative resistance to intellectual property law: civil disobedience and “copyleft” Perelman provides a historical analysis of intellectual property law and criticism of it. But creative challenges to such law are very much part of the contemporary scene, and among these are Tom Forsythe’s “Barbie” art and the efforts of the copyleft movement. Tom Forsythe is a Utah-based artist who uses Barbie dolls in his art. While claiming “fair use” (in Canada and the U.K., “fair dealing”), Forsythe has been sued by Mattel for breach of copyright. See his website at the Rogue’s Gallery for images of his subversive Barbie doll artworks, and a record of his ongoing legal battle with Mattel. A more intellectual response to copyright, and one that gives formal legal expression to recent phenomena like the open source movement (e.g., Linux), peer-to-peer file sharing online, the Wikipedia encyclopedia, and other attempts to resist what is felt to be the corporate takeover of intellectual property law, is the “copyleft” movement. Led by major Copy Leftists like Richard Stallman (GNU) and Lawrence Lessig, the “copyleft” concept is meant to offer an alternative