This book provides a comprehensive critique of the idea that 'intellectual property' exists as an object that can be owned.

This book shows how intellectual property turned the family into a market while, simultaneously, the market became a family.

Introduces the concept of 'IP accidents' to establish a new way to look at intellectual property law and its enforcement.

Exploring the concept of copyright subject matter through the lenses of law, aesthetics, and cognitive science, this book describes the historical evolution of a work into an artefact that qualifies as copyrightable subject matter. Discussing the originality requirement towards an artefactual understating of intangible goods, copyright’s present struggles with modern societies and technologies, and growing inequalities between rights holders and producers, the book adopts an interdisciplinary approach based on studies in law, aesthetics, neuroscience, and cognitive science to present a novel perspective on the non-artefactual and contextual identification of copyright subject matter. The book examines the challenges raised by aesthetic and neuroaesthetic concepts and cognitive studies, seeking to create a unifying framework of identification strategies for modern copyright law which embrace historical, philosophical, and social perspectives; the book develops a research methodology that offers a new interdisciplinary and holistic approach for understanding the subject of copyright and better addressing the needs of modern society, technology and business models. Touching on normative understandings of creativity and legal-philosophical, aesthetic, and cognitive considerations with regard to the idea/expression dichotomy in copyright law, the book will be of immense interest to legal scholars, legal philosophers, aestheticians, and neuroaestheticians.

This book takes as its starting point recent debates over the dematerialisation of subject matter which have arisen because of changes in information technology, molecular biology, and related fields that produced a subject matter with no obvious material form or trace. Arguing against the idea that dematerialisation is a uniquely twenty-first century problem, this book looks at three situations where US patent law has already dealt with a dematerialised subject matter: nineteenth century chemical inventions, computer-related inventions in the 1970s, and biological subject matter across the twentieth century. In looking at what we can learn from these historical accounts about how the law responded to a dematerialised subject matter and the role that science and technology played in that process, this book provides a history of patentable subject matter in the United States. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Recent decades have witnessed the creation of new types of property systems, ranging from data ownership to national control over genetic resources. This trend has significant implications for wealth distribution and our understanding of who can own what. This book explores the idea of ownership in the realm of plant breeding, revealing how plants have been legally and materially transformed into property. It highlights the controversial aspects of turning seeds, plants and genes into property and how this endangers the viability of the seed industry. Examining ownership not simply as a legal concept, but as a bundle of laws, practices and technologies, this is a valuable contribution that will interest scholars of intellectual property studies, the anthropology of markets, science and technology studies and related fields.

During the past century, intellectual property (IP) law has expanded within and beyond national borders. The field of IP law was once a niche area concerning authors, inventors, and trademark owners. Today, IP law acts as a complex regime of instruments, institutions, and actors that negotiate overlapping, diverging, and occasionally competing public policies on a global scale. As IP continues to expand beyond borders, the instruments and tools utilised for its global protection rely on public international law as the common denominator and unifying frame. Intellectual Property Ordering Beyond Borders provides an evaluation of the most pertinent public international law questions raised by this multidimensional expansion. This comprehensive and far-reaching volume tackles problems such as generalist approaches under the law of treaties; custom and general principles; interfaces between IP and other normative orders, such as trade and investment; and interdisciplinary accounts from the economic, political, and social science perspectives. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

This book examines the way in which this important area of law is constructed by the legal system.

The first serious, extended effort to use a human rights-based approach to address the scientific issues affecting society and the often-neglected human right to science.

This book explains China’s intellectual property perspective in the context of European theories, through a critical examination of intellectual property theory and practice focused on China’s compliance with the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). The author’s critical review of contemporary intellectual property philosophy suggests that justifying intellectual property protection through Locke or Hegel’s property theories internalizes a theoretical paradox. “Professor Wenwei Guan’s treatment of intellectual property law and practice in the PRC offers new perspectives that enrich an already active field of study . . . This book will be a useful contribution to academic and policy discourses examining conceptual and operational dimensions of China’s intellectual property protection system and the broader process of China’s international engagement.” – Dr. Pitman B. Potter, Professor of Law, University of British Columbia, Canada “Dr. Guan reminds us of the daunting challenge of the public-private divide in forming and reforming TRIPS regime; how this regime has failed to address development needs and public concerns in developing countries like China; and how TRIPS’s ‘birth defect’ can be overcome and its evolution can be put back on the right track.” – Dr. Yahong Li, Associate Professor at Faculty of Law, Hong Kong University