Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Law
Understanding Intellectual Property: Expression, Function, And Individuation, Mala Chatterjee
Understanding Intellectual Property: Expression, Function, And Individuation, Mala Chatterjee
Faculty Scholarship
Underlying the fundamental structure of intellectual property law — specifically, the division between copyright and patent law — are at least two substantive philosophical assumptions. The first is that artistic works and inventions are importantly different, such that they warrant different legal systems: copyright law on the one hand, and patent law on the other. And the second is that particular artistic works and inventions can be determinately individuated from each other, and can thereby be the subjects of distinct and delineated legal rights. But neither the law nor existing scholarship provides a comprehensive analysis of these categories, what distinguishes …
Making Coasean Property More Coasean, Thomas W. Merrill, Henry E. Smith
Making Coasean Property More Coasean, Thomas W. Merrill, Henry E. Smith
Faculty Scholarship
In his pioneering work on transaction costs, Ronald Coase presupposed a picture of property as a bundle of government-prescribed use rights. Not only is this picture not essential to Coase’s purpose, but its limitations emerge when we apply Coase’s central insights to analyze the structure of property itself. This leads to the Coase corollary: in a world of zero transaction costs, the nature of property does not matter to allocative efficiency. However, as with the Coase theorem, the real implication is for our world of positive transaction costs: we need to subject the notion of property to a comparative institutional …
Accession And Original Ownership, Thomas W. Merrill
Accession And Original Ownership, Thomas W. Merrill
Faculty Scholarship
Although first possession is generally assumed to be the dominant means of establishing original ownership of property, there is a second but less studied principle for initiating ownership, called accession, which awards new resources to the owner of existing property most prominently connected to the new resource. Accession applies across a wide variety of areas, from determining rights to baby animals and growing crops to determining ownership of derivative rights under intellectual property laws. Accession shares common features with first possession, in that both principles assign ownership uniquely in a way that imposes minimal information cost burdens on society. But …
The Dynamic Analytics Of Property Law, Michael A. Heller
The Dynamic Analytics Of Property Law, Michael A. Heller
Faculty Scholarship
The standard property trilogy of private, commons, and state has become so outdated that it now impedes imagination and innovation at the frontiers of ownership. This essay suggests two approaches – creating new ideal types and synthesizing existing ones – that may help update our static property metaphors. Using these dynamic approaches to property analytics, legal theory can move beyond polarizing oppositions that have made jurisprudential debates unsolvable and rendered concrete problems invisible.