The predominant justification for most intellectual property rights is the incentive theory or utilitarian rationale. Behind this justification lies the Western idea of progress and its derivatives, liberalism, capitalism and consumerism. This article shows that the progress ideology rests on...

Intellectual property rights are exclusive rights the law gives to authors and inventors to stimulate creativity and innovation. Intellectual property laws’ justification assumes that the more creations and inventions there are, the better off the population is. Therefore, the law promotes...

Intellectual property rights, conventionally seen as quite distinct, are increasingly overlapping with one another. There are several reasons for this: the expansion of IPRs beyond their traditional borders, the creation of new IPRs especially at EU level, the exploitation of gaps in the law by...

Over the recent past, technological advances (among other effects) have opened a grey area of intellectual property that cannot be properly covered by either of the two existing legal regimes, patent and copyright. Some innovations do not fall easily into either regime, while others seem to fall...

The particular case of software seems to have stretched the patent-copyright divide to the point of breakage. Inspite of being traditionally excluded from patent, software is an obvious case of a single creation that embodies both expression and innovation, and so strong arguments exist for...

This paper reviews briefly how the owner of the copyright to a creation can best market access to that right to licensees under a variety of assumptions concerning the market. After an introductory section, the paper considers a situation of full certainty, in which the value of the final...