The IP Wave: When Women March

August 2025, and in some bright, buzzing co-working office in Lagos, a young female coder has just realised that her AI-generated painting was employed in an international fashion campaign without her knowledge. Some across the world, far away in Buenos Aires, activists are holding up signs that say, “Who Owns Her Face?” against flimsy laws on deepfake pornography.

And if you roll around to Geneva, diplomats drink espresso discussing whether artificial womb technology (the Matrix coming to life much?) would qualify as a medical innovation or a “sociopolitical revolution”.

Welcome to the three months between July and September 2025, where gender and intellectual property (IP) didn’t just overlap - they exposed certain truths - mismatched puzzle pieces being forced into the same frame, exposing the cracks in the system that pretends they naturally fit.

When Copyright Meets Consent

The initial fracture came in the growing controversy over AI-generated deepfakes. Technology caught up with nearly every legal protection by mid-2025. Spain and South Korea tried to criminalize the non-consensual production of sexually explicit AI content, but enforcement fell behind the pace of development. And who took the hit? Women.

It’s not that men were not targeted by deepfakes, but the overwhelming evidence indicated women, particularly public figures - were disproportionately targeted. The questions flowed:

• If your image is hijacked, is it an IP infringement or a human rights violation?

• Must your face be copyrighted like Disney copyrights Mickey Mouse?

• And if so, who cracks down on it, you, your government, or some global IP bureau suffocating in acronyms?

By the end of August, online feminists were referring to it as “the pornography of pixels“, highlighting how the lack of robust IP protections on personal identity made an old tale deeper - women’s bodies, even when represented virtually, were indeed public property.

Patents and the Politics of the Body

At the same time in Geneva, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) focused on biotech. The patenting of artificial womb (ectogenesis technologies) took centre stage. To some, these machines symbolised freedom - separating reproduction from women’s biological costs.

To others, they had the whiff of dystopia - what about when companies control the devices that could one day substitute for pregnancy itself?

The feminist movement was divided. Some welcomed ectogenesis to ending patriarchal dominance of women’s reproductive work. Others were concerned about commodification of gestation, in which a multinational corporation could hold not only the machine but also the process of giving birth.

And the lawyers descended with their categories. Is gestation a “method” or a “device”? Does the patent extend to the physical device, or the biological one it imitates? Hiding in the legalese was a larger question:

When technology imitates something deeply human, should it ever be owned by a company The argument over who owns reproduction was no longer theoretical - It was commercial, gendered, and pressing.

Fashion and Feminist Copyright

Pan-continents, another war raged related to fashion IP. In July, Kenya and India again led the charge to safeguard traditional cultural expressions—embroidery, weaving designs, motifs usually held together by women in native communities. Fashion houses in Milan and Paris, still egregiously guilty of “borrowing” freely, were attacked, read Prada.

One of the viral headlines was: “She Weaves, They Profit.” The outrage was not only about cultural robbery but gendered erasure. Rural women craftswomen who had kept these skills going for centuries weren’t even present in the room when contracts were inked.

And thus, the IP paradox revealed itself - it promises to reward creativity but tends to reward lawyers, labels, and lobbying capacity. Feminist theorists contended that IP in its current form is more about sustaining hierarchies—gendered, raced, and economic—than about safeguarding ideas.

Source: Pinterest

Tech Bros and the Metaverse Makeover

And then the metaverse arrived, which—much to critics’ claims of being passé—wouldn’t quit. By September 2025, sites started to allow users to “trademark” avatars. And then the debates ensued: if you trademark your pixelated self, does that mean no one can replicate your virtual strut or your neon sari?

It empowered some women. After years of harassment online, having your avatar was like taking back control. But others feared: what if corporations trademark you before you can? Already, incidents emerged where influencers found their digital clones owned by startups eager for licensing opportunities.

This was also gendered. Women’s avatars were more commonly hijacked, eroticized, and commodified. The metaverse, which was supposed to be a playground, reiterated the same tired tune: Can women ever really own themselves—online or offline—when IP systems privilege capital over consent?

The Global South Speaks Up

Some of the most striking interventions were from the Global South. Latin American and African activists reshaped IP not as a technical niche but as a battleground for gender equality. In August, an alliance of NGOs launched a campaign called “Our Knowledge, Our Rights”, insisting that traditional birth practices, medicinal knowledge, and women’s collective innovations not be patented by pharmaceutical giants.

Consider this - when a corporation patents a fertility herb rural women have used for ages, is it innovation or theft? Feminist attorneys termed it biopiracy in legal guise.

In this case, the discussion of IP intersected with postcolonial feminism. Whose knowledge is considered worthy of protection? Whose innovation is dismissed as “folk wisdom” until a corporation repackages it for global consumption?

The Heart of the Matter

What was so interesting about these months isn’t that the law is complex but the intransigent reappearance of one theme - ownership. Ownership of faces. Ownership of wombs. Ownership of stitches, avatars, and even ancient seeds.

The 19th and 20th century design of the IP system continues to blunder into the 21st century questions of gender and power. And once again, women’s bodies and work are the site of experimentation.

So maybe the question is really this - Is intellectual property actually about the protection of ideas, or about determining whose ideas are permitted to be important?

Where Do We Go from Here?

By the 23rd of September in the year 2025, no magic bullet had appeared. Legislation lagged behind technology; feminist protests preceded both. But something changed. Gender activists no longer presented IP as a drab, esoteric matter. Rather, they claimed it as a feminist front—one that bridges the rural craftsman to the digital influencer, the biotech critic to the gamer, the lawyer to the activist brandishing a protest sign. It sees IP as a beacon of change.

Maybe this is the finer disturbing lesson of 2025 - IP isn’t simply patents and copyrights. It’s about power.