Drawing on ethnographic research in Mexico and Argentina, this essay addresses the promise, limits, and specificities of the generic pharmaceutical as a legal, technical, and political artifact. Attending to the complex commercial semiotics of "similarity" in Mexico, and to the powerful figure of the domestic copia in Argentina, I argue that at stake with the rise and expansion of markets for generic drugs is not simply a David and Goliath relationship between the (cheaper, accessible, democratizing) generic and the (expensive) patented original. Also central to a politics of the generic is the shifting line between the licit and the illicit copy. The essay thus poses the question, what are the implications of configuring a political language of "access" around the terms of intellectual property itself?
patents; generics; politics of the copy