The type individuation problem

Lockean justifi cations of intellectual property postulate the appropriation of immaterial entities, in various contexts called types, patterns, designs, or technologies. It is widely believed that the ownership of such entities gives the owner a right to control their physical embodiments and prohibit imitation. For the prohibition to be meaningful, a condition identifying forbidden objects must be formulated. It must cover not only objects which are identical to some original artifact or its exact, ideal description, but also those which are only similar. This requires systematic answers to three questions: (1) which material structures and which of their subsets should be compared? (2) which of their characteristics should be compared? (3) how to combine these characteristics into a decision rule for token identification? There is no underlying empirical reality that could be independently consulted by individuals in order to incontestably answer these questions. Meanwhile constant evolution in technology and arts requires addressing them repeatedly. Consequently, intellectual property regimes must rely on political institutions incessantly dictating the scope of prohibition, and hence they cannot originate or exist in a prelegal state of nature.

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Prima facie reasons to question enclosed intellectual property regimes and favor open-source regimes for germplasm

F1000Research ◽

10.12688/f1000research.10497.1 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 6 ◽

pp. 284 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Madeleine-Thérèse Halpert ◽

M. Jahi Chappell

Keyword(s):

Food Security ◽

Intellectual Property ◽

Critical Evaluation ◽

Prima Facie ◽

Empirical Reality ◽

Seed Industry ◽

Alternative Approaches ◽

Social Goods ◽

Property Regimes ◽

Property Regime

In principle, intellectual property protections (IPPs) promote and protect important but costly investment in research and development. However, the empirical reality of IPPs has often gone without critical evaluation, and the potential of alternative approaches to lend equal or greater support for useful innovation is rarely considered. In this paper, we review the mounting evidence that the global intellectual property regime (IPR) for germplasm has been neither necessary nor sufficient to generate socially beneficial improvements in crop plants and maintain agrobiodiversity. Instead, based on our analysis, the dominant global IPR appears to have contributed to consolidation in the seed industry while failing to genuinely engage with the potential of alternatives to support social goods such as food security, adaptability, and resilience. The dominant IPR also constrains collaborative and cumulative plant breeding processes that are built upon the work of countless farmers past and present. Given the likely limits of current IPR, we propose that social goods in agriculture may be better supported by alternative approaches, warranting a rapid move away from the dominant single-dimensional focus on encouraging innovation through ensuring monopoly profits to IPP holders.

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Intellectual property regimes and wage inequality

Journal of Development Economics ◽

10.1016/j.jdeveco.2021.102709 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 102709

Author(s):

Sourav Bhattacharya ◽

Pavel Chakraborty ◽

Chirantan Chatterjee

Keyword(s):

Intellectual Property ◽

Wage Inequality ◽

Property Regimes

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With whom do firms form ties? A meta-analysis on the influence of embeddedness and proximity on inter-organizational tie formation

10.31219/osf.io/3akbn ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Johannes Marinus van Zelst ◽

Remco Mannak ◽

Leon Oerlemans

Keyword(s):

Intellectual Property ◽

Contingency Theory ◽

Meta Analysis ◽

Explanatory Power ◽

Future Research ◽

Relational Embeddedness ◽

Property Regimes

We meta-analyze the influence of various forms of embeddedness and proximity on interorganizational tie formation with a dataset that encompasses 256,529 ties from 73 studies. First, we uncover the unparalleled importance of relational embeddedness, while the influence of structural and positional embeddedness turns out to be highly dependent on the context. Second, we show that various forms of proximity positively influence tie formation and have unique explanatory power in addition to the embeddedness dimensions. Last, we explore to what extent these effects are contingent on the type of tie, resource munificence, status orientation, level of individuality, and intellectual property regimes. Our study introduces a preliminary contingency theory of interorganizational tie formation and provides directions for future research.

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