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Designing Food, Owning The Cornucopia: What The Patented Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwich Might Teach About Gmos, Modified Foods, The Replicator, And Non-Scarcity Economics, Thomas C. Folsom
Akron Intellectual Property Journal
Imagine for purposes of discussion that the technology for designing and building an actual cornucopia—something that embodies code, genetically modified organisms, or other techniques for producing, modifying, creating, or duplicating food (call it neo-tech food design)— exists, works, and is safe. To frame the problems of neo-tech food design, I start with what ought to be an easy case of low-tech food design, the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Since it is a prime example of an incremental improvement invention, and hence like very many other inventions that are routinely patented, it must be asked: was there a problem? And …
The Tragedy Of (Ignoring) The Information Semicommons: A Cultural Environmental Perspective, Robert Cunningham
The Tragedy Of (Ignoring) The Information Semicommons: A Cultural Environmental Perspective, Robert Cunningham
Akron Intellectual Property Journal
The second enclosure movement critique is familiar theoretical territory for scholars concerned with the creeping maximalist impulse of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs). Just as the first enclosure movement relating to real property created controversies concerning social contract and the advertised efficiencies of private real property, so too these concerns are echoed within the context of IPRs. This paper employs the emergent discourse of cultural environmentalism so as to diagnose and resolve IPR issues evident within the information environment. Cultural environmentalism borrows, begs, and steals analytical frameworks from environmentalism, such as those relating to the commons, public choice theory, welfare economics, …