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Intellectualizing Property: The Tenuous Connections Between Land And Copyright, Stewart E. Sterk

Articles

Increased use of the intellectual property label to describe copyright and related areas of law has spawned analogies to the protections afforded real property. These analogies ignore significant differences between the foundations that undergird real and intellectual property rights. In particular, real property rights operate to avoid breaches of the peace and tragedies of the commons - problems that do not arise with intellectual works - while copyright and other intellectual property rights are designed to provide an incentive to create, an incentive irrelevant when land is at issue. These disparities in justification caution against routine importation of real property …