This paper offers a few elements of an answer to the question to what extent drug patents can be morally justified. Justifications based on natural rights, distributive justice and utilitarian arguments are discussed and criticized. The author recognizes the potential of the patents to benefit society but argues that the system is currently evolving in the wrong direction, particularly in the field of drugs. More than a third of the world’s population has no access to essential drugs. The working of (...) the patent system is an important determinant of access to drugs. This paper argues that drug patents are not easily justified and that the ‘architecture’ of the patent system should be rethought in view of its mission of benefiting society. (shrink)

The scope and type of property rights recognized over the effectiveness of antibiotics have a direct effect on how those claiming ownership engage in the exploitation and stewardship of this scarce resource. We examine the different property claims and rights the four major interest groups are asserting on antibiotics: (i) the inventors, (ii) those demanding that the resource be treated like any other transferable commodity, (iii) those advocating usage restrictions based on good stewardship principles and (iv) those considering the resource (...) as common heritage of humankind. (shrink)

Insight into the relation between technology and society can be obtained by imagining that the world is organized differently and then determining how technology would be different. This approach is illustrated by discussion of three alternative worlds: one in which defense is carried out by nonviolent methods, one in which there is no intellectual property, and one in which workers control decisions about their work.

Intellectual property regimes necessarily create artificial scarcity leading to wastage, both by blocking follow-up research and hindering access to those who are only able to pay less then the actual retail price. After revising the traditional arguments to hinder access to people’s intellectual labour we will examine why we should be more open to allow free-riding of inventive efforts, especially in cases where innovators have not secured the widest access to the fruits of their research and failed to cooperate with (...) follow-up innovators. We will do so by questioning the voluntariness involved in consumption of objects of innovation, restating the positive social externalities that arise when wider access to the fruits of innovation is assured, and examining the eventual harms innovators face. (shrink)

Patents on biotech products have a scope that goes well beyond what is covered by the most widely applied ethical justifications of intellectual property. Neither natural rights theory from Locke, nor public interest theory of IP rights justifies the wide scope of legal protection. The article takes human genes as an example, focusing on the component that is not invented but persists as unaltered gene information even in the synthetically produced complementary DNA, the cDNA. It is argued that patent on (...) cDNA holds this information captive, or illegitimately appropriates it in limiting other researchers and inventors’ opportunity to explore new functions and uses based on this non-invented information. A tighter connection between legal IP protection and the use description stated in the patent claim is suggested. By binding protection to the product’s foreseeable functions and use, instead of the product itself and all future uses of it, legitimacy of biotech product patents is restored. (shrink)

Taking people’s longevity as a measure of good life, humankind can proudly say that the average person is living a much longer life than ever before. The AIDS epidemic has however for the first time in decades stalled and in some cases even reverted this trend in a number of countries. Climate change is increasingly becoming a major challenge for food security and we can anticipate that hunger caused by crop damages will become much more common. -/- Since many of (...) the challenges humanity faced in the past were overcome by inventive solutions coming from the life sciences, we are compelled to reconsider how we incentivize science and technology development so that those in need can benefit more broadly from scientific research. There is a huge portion of the world population that is in urgent need for medicines to combat diseases that are currently neglected by the scientific community and could immensely benefit from agricultural research that specifically targets their environmental conditions. At the same time efforts have to be made to make the fruits of current and future research more widely accessible. These changes would have to be backed by a range of moral arguments to attract people with diverging notions of global justice. This article explores the main ethical theories used to demand a greater share in the benefits from scientific progress for the poor. Since life sciences bring about a number of special concerns, a short list of conflictive issues is also offered. (shrink)

This essay reviews six different approaches to intellectual property. It and argues that none of these accounts provide an adequate justification of intellectual property laws and policies because (1) there are many different types of intellectual property, and (2) a variety of incommensurable values play a role in the justification of intellectual property. The best approach to intellectual property is to assess and balance competing moral values in light of the particular facts and circumstances.

For the past three years, Coronavirus-19 (Covid-19) has become one of the major global health problems. Unlike any previous virus in the past decades, Covid-19 has shown its unprecedented spreading speed, infection rate, fatality rate, etc. Under this urgent disease outbursting event, scientists around the globe, through the myriad of research and experiments, successfully developed effective vaccines. However, like many other medical innovations, Covid-19 vaccines are categorized as intellectual properties and a scarce resource. As a consequence, the citizens of developed (...) and developing countries face an imbalanced distribution of affordable vaccines. The formation of this issue is not only due to manufacturing, transportation, and other infrastructures, but also strongly correlated with aspects in the legal field, such as intellectual property rights (IPRs). With a humane common sense of vaccination many people, through comparative research method, this article aims to discuss the conflicts between the global crisis of Force Majeure and the interests of certain countries or corporations, possible solutions to resolve this conflict, and future coping strategies that ought to be published. (shrink)

This paper examines the question whether, and to what extent, John Locke’s classic theory of property can be applied to the current debate involving intellectual property rights (IPRs) and the information commons. Organized into four main sections, Section 1 includes a brief exposition of Locke’s arguments for the just appropriation of physical objects and tangible property. In Section 2, I consider some challenges involved in extending Locke’s labor theory of property to the debate about IPRs and digital information. In Section (...) 3, it is argued that even if the labor analogy breaks down, we should not necessarily infer that Locke’s theory has no relevance for the contemporary debate involving IPRs and the information commons. Alternatively, I argue that much of what Locke has to say about the kinds of considerations that ought to be accorded to the physical commons when appropriating objects from it – especially his proviso requiring that “enough and as good” be left for others – can also be applied to appropriations involving the information commons. Based on my reading of Locke’s proviso, I further argue that Locke would presume in favor of the information commons when competing interests (involving the rights of individual appropriators and the preservation of the commons) are at stake. In this sense, I believe that Locke offers us an adjudicative principle for evaluating the claims advanced by rival interests in the contemporary debate about IPRs and the information commons. In Section 4, I apply Locke’s proviso in my analysis of two recent copyright laws: the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). I then argue that both laws violate the spirit of Locke’s proviso because they unfairly restrict the access that ordinary individuals have previously had to resources that comprise the information commons. Noting that Locke would not altogether reject copyright protection for IPRs, I conclude that Locke’s classic property theory provides a useful mechanism for adjudicating between claims about how best to ensure that individuals will be able to continue to access information in digitized form, while at the same time also allowing for that information to enjoy some form of legal protection. (shrink)

The article addresses the role of scarcity in negotiating the relationship between intellectual property, particularly from a legal-economic perspective, and property rights, as understood by transaction cost economics, to shed light on the deadlock faced by those suffering from neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). The consistency of the law and economics fundamentals that support the trade on knowledge goods, namely patents on essential medicines, is put under check by Scott Veitch’s scholarship on legal irresponsibility. The damages that emerge from the operations (...) of the intellectual property system are registered in the novel concept of negative public domain, and are due mainly to the lack of access to treatments that end up being unaffordable, or to innovation that leads to new drugs that is not sufficiently incentivised though price signals. The accountability for such damages is taken into consideration by arguing that the disavowal of responsibility is made possible by the negative public domain, which is balanced by the construction of a positive response through the language of rights. As such, responsibility per se is preserved, evading one instantiation of Teubner’s legal paradoxes, but rendered ineffective by design. In other words, even if the harms endured by those affected by the NTDs can be traced back to the operations of the intellectual property system, there is no one to hold accountable. The main goal pursued through the article is to make such an arrangement explicit, by giving centrality to the notion of scarcity and its interplay between legal and economic theory, alongside the novel concept of negative public domain as a site where the actual consequences of irresponsibility lie, to hopefully inform further critique in subsequent works. (shrink)

In a global economic landscape of hyper-commodification and financialisation, efforts to assimilate digital art into the high-stakes commercial art market have so far been rather unsuccessful, presumably because digital artworks cannot easily assume the status of precious object worthy of collection. This essay explores the use of blockchain technologies in attempts to create proprietary digital art markets in which uncommodifiable digital artworks are financialised as artificially scarce commodities. Using the decentralisation techniques and distributed database protocols underlying current cryptocurrency technologies, such (...) efforts, exemplified here by the platform Monegraph, tend to be presented as concerns with the interest of digital artists and with shifting ontologies of the contemporary work of art. I challenge this characterisation, and argue, in a discussion that combines aesthetic theory, legal and philosophical theories of intellectual property, rhetorical analysis and research in the political economy of new media, that the formation of proprietary digital art markets by emerging commercial platforms such as Monegraph constitutes a worrisome amplification of long-established, on-going efforts to fence in creative expression as private property. As I argue, the combination of blockchain-based protocols with established ambitions of intellectual property policy yields hybrid conceptual-computational financial technologies (such as self-enforcing smart contracts attached to digital artefacts) that are unlikely to empower artists but which serve to financialise digital creative practices as a whole, curtailing the critical potential of the digital as an inherently dynamic and potentially uncommodifiable mode of production and artistic expression. (shrink)

The law of patents has long struggled with the status of intent in determining liability for infringement. This struggle has recently been given a sharper edge by the emergence of biotechnological products with the inherent ability of auto-dispersal and regeneration. The question thus is whether a person on whose backyard a patented genetic organism has grown without the active intervention of that person is liable in infringement to the patentee of that organism. This article examines the ramifications of the legal (...) conundrum and argues that on a proper construction of the theories of liability in patent law intent to infringe is necessarily crucial if the nature of the subject matter of the patent makes it unjust and absurd to argue otherwise. (shrink)

The introduction to the current quarterly issue.