Ownership of Knowledge. Beyond Intellectual Property

The MIT Press eBooks, 2023

The MIT Press eBooks, 2023

Social Anthropology, 2007

This Article critically examines the inadequacy of theoretical postulates on intellectual property. It acknowledges that theorizing around intellectual property is an important ongoing but elusive intellectual adventure that is critical for law and policy direction on intellectual property. Perhaps, at no time is this fact more obvious than in the extant post-industrial epoch or the era of Global Knowledge Economy (" GKE "). The latter is spurred by advances in bio-and digital technologies. Both phenomena drive significant shift and transition in intellectual property jurisprudence and in the tide of innovation from physical to life sciences. They also supervise implosions in new and complex domains or sites for knowledge and information generation. As its feature, the global knowledge economic order is undergirded by an institutional and structural shift in international intellectual property lawmaking and governance, provoking a serendipitous counter-regime dynamic in diverse sites for contestations around intellectual property. The pivotal role of intellectual property in the GKE presents intellectual property as an increasingly multidisciplinary subject with complex issue linkages in virtually all fronts, including public health, human rights, biodiversity, biotechnology, biopiracy, the environment, ethics, culture, indigenous knowledge, electronic commerce, and research ethos. Overall, these and many more issue linkages to intellectual property are part of the latter's open-ended dynamics in the GKE. They are constitutive of a myriad of factors that task and shape policy and theory on intellectual property as the knowledge economy continues to unravel.

Journal of Economic Surveys, 2006

Abstract This paper explores the debates surrounding whether or not we have now moved into a new knowledge economy and/or knowledge society and if so whether this shift is as significant and as far reaching as the industrial revolution. In this possible transformation the place of information communications technologies has been crucial. Debate has occurred across both economics and sociology with differing emphases as is shown in the ranges of definitions that we review in the paper. One consistent factor is the lack of clarity and consistency between them both within and across the disciplines. In order to explore the issues that the debates raises in a more grounded way, the paper explores them in relation to intellectual property (IP) and the intellectual commons in the process of innovation, growth and economic development. The paper is developed through an analysis first of the industrial revolution and the role within this of uncertainty, technologies, complementarities and elective affinities and the way IP was protected and controlled through patents, secrecy, being first to the market and copyright. The second part of the paper examines definitions of the knowledge economy and society and the role within these of information communication technologies in order to explore whether the ways that IP is protected and controlled have changed. In the debate about the ‘knowledge economy and society’ the role of innovation via human capital with a greater reliance on intellectual capabilities has been emphasized. The role of IP thus remains central but is now challenged by the rise of new forms of communication, which make its protection harder and move much of the concern with respect to regulation to a global rather than national and local level.

Journal of Economic …, 2006

Edukacja Międzykulturowa, 2020

2024

Healthy, Immutable, and Beautiful. Eleatic Pantheism and Epicurean Theology, in C. Kurfess, A. Motta (eds.), Eleatic ontology in Hellenistic period to late antiquity, Napoli, FedOA Press, 2024, pp. 33-54