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Toward A Lockean Moral Justification Of Legal Protection Of Intellectual Property, Kenneth Einar Himma
Toward A Lockean Moral Justification Of Legal Protection Of Intellectual Property, Kenneth Einar Himma
San Diego Law Review
This Article attempts to provide the beginnings of a viable moral justification for recognizing and providing legal protection of intellectual property. The argument follows a line of arguments that is fairly characterized as “inspired” by John Locke’s attempt to justify legal protection of what he took to be a natural, objective, moral right to material property. That is to say, it is Lockean in spirit in the following sense: Locke grounds his argument for original acquisition in the idea that a person is justified in acquiring something from the commons in virtue of an investment he makes of something that …
Managing The Intellectual Property Sprawl, Shubha Ghosh
Managing The Intellectual Property Sprawl, Shubha Ghosh
San Diego Law Review
Professor Merges, despite the centrality of creative persons to his argument, organizes a set of ideas that are conducive to refocusing intellectual property law on users. I present this user-focused argument in this Article through the following five Parts. Part II explains my suggested approach to questions about the design of intellectual property law—an approach based on the new institutional economics and the work of Ronald Coase. Part II also addresses objections to this approach. Part III identifies the user in Professor Merges’s high-level principles grounded in Locke, Kant, and Rawls. Part IV follows this argument with a closer examination …
A Lockean Theory Of Intellectual Property Revisited, Adam D. Moore
A Lockean Theory Of Intellectual Property Revisited, Adam D. Moore
San Diego Law Review
The primary, and perhaps sole, function of government according to Locke was to secure and protect the lives, liberties, and property of individuals who consented, explicitly or tacitly, to a specific political union. The question that I will address in this Article, and one that I took up over fifteen years ago, is: should we consider intellectual works to be the proper subjects of Lockean property claims? My answer then and now is “yes,” with the acknowledgement that such a view may require substantial revisions to Anglo-American systems of intellectual property. I will argue that intellectual property rights are no …