Intellectual property: the global spread of a legal concept

Although intellectual property law is a distinctively Western, modern, and relatively young body of law, it has spread all over the world, now encompassing all but a very few outsiders such as Afghanistan, Somalia, and Vanuatu. This article presents three legal transfers that contributed to this development: first, from real property in land and movables to intellectual property in the late 18th century in Western Europe; second, from Western Europe, in particular from the United Kingdom and France to the rest of the world during the colonial era in the 19th and early 20th century; third, from the protection of new knowledge to the protection of traditional knowledge, held by indigenous communities in developing countries, on 5 August 1963. This story illuminates how legal transfers in a broad sense – including, but not limited to legal transplants - drive the evolution of law

Fictitious Commodities: A Theory of Intellectual Property Inspired by Karl Polanyi’s “Great Transformation”

The puzzle this Article addresses is this: how can it be explained that intellectual property (IP) laws and IP rights (IPRs) have continuously grown in number and expanded in scope, territorial reach, and duration, while at the same time have been contested, much more so than other branches of property law? This Article offers an explanation for this peculiar dynamic by applying insights and concepts of Karl Polanyi’s book “The Great Transformation” to IP. It reconstructs and then applies core Polanyian concepts of commodification (infra, II), fictitious commodities (infra, III), and countermovements (infra, IV) to the three main areas of IP, namely copyrights, patents, and trademarks, as they have evolved and are currently regulated in international and selected national laws. The analysis reveals that the history of IP can be told in terms of Polanyi’s famous “double movement”: efforts to commodify virtually every reproducible input/output face equally persistent opposition, which points out the disruption that IPRs inflict upon communication and competition. Whereas IPRs dis-embed informational artefacts from the uninterrupted flow of societal exchange and subject them to prior authorization requirements, IP countermovements call for their re-embedding, i.e. their usability irrespective of authorization. From a normative perspective, a Polanyian perspective on IP suggests that IP law and policy should ensure that market-based transactions coexist with non-market modes of accessing and sharing information so that authors, inventors, and other entrepreneurs have as many options as possibl

The fundamental right to (intellectual) property and the discretion of the legislature

The article makes two points regarding the fundamental rights dimensions of intellectual property (IP). First, it explains why the prevailing approach to balancing the fundamental right to intellectual property with conflicting fundamental freedoms as if they were of equal rank is conceptually flawed and should be replaced by a justification paradigm. Second, it highlights the pre-eminent role of the legislature and the much more limited role of the judiciary in developing IP law. The arguments are based on an analysis of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and last but not least the German Constitutional Court, the Bundesverfassungsgericht, regarding the respective inter-/supra-/national fundamental-rights regimes

External technology supply and client-side innovation

Flexibility in response to competitive pressure from globalized markets and increasingly individualized customer desires has become vital for firms. A common strategy to address this challenge is to employ a dynamic concept of organization and reach beyond the boundaries of the firm. Accordingly, technology transfer from providers of knowledge intensive business services attracts more and more attention. In this context we focus on external supply of information technology and client-side innovation. The aim of this paper is to contribute to resolving an empirical puzzle arising from the prior literature. Some authors find beneficial effects of IT outsourcing, others underline that firms often fail to achieve expected strategic goals. Our stylized theoretical model combines a knowledge production function framework and transaction cost economics. We hypothesize that the right balance between internal and external knowledge is critical for innovation. The empirical application is German firm-level data covering a wide range of industries from 2003 to 2006. Our results largely support the theoretical arguments and suggest a positive linear relationship between the level of outsourcing and process innovation. For product innovation we find a hump-shape. --knowledge production function,transaction cost economics,product innovation,process innovation,KIBS,IT outsourcing,ZEW ICT survey

Der digitale Urheber

Das dominante Rechtfertigungsnarrativ des kontinentaleuropäischen Urheberrechts ist der Schutz des kreativen Urhebers. Das diesbezügliche Leitbild ist der romantische Genius, der fern der Welt auf Hilfe durch Verwerter und einen starken Schutz seines „geistigen Eigentums“ in ihren Händen angewiesen ist. Im digitalen Zeitalter ist jedoch ein neuer Typus des Urhebers hervorgetreten: der digitale Urheber. Ihre Inspirationsquelle und zugleich ihr unternehmerisches Verbreitungs- und Vermarktungsmedium ist das globale Netz. Der Beitrag erörtert, welche Konsequenzen sich insbesondere für das Urhebervertragsrecht ergeben, wenn das Leitbild des digitalen Urhebers an die Stelle des romantischen/analogen Urhebers tritt.The dominant justification narrative of Continental European author’s rights systems is the protection of the creative author. This author has been conceived as a romantic genius who is in need of producers and a strong protection of his “intellectual property” in their hands. The digital era, however, has brought about a new type of author: the digital author. The internet is her source of inspiration and her entrepreneurial channel of distribution and self-marketing. The article discusses the consequences for copyright contract law if the concept of the romantic/analog author is replaced by the concept of the digital author

The risks of risk-based AI regulation: taking liability seriously

The development and regulation of multi-purpose, large "foundation models" of AI seems to have reached a critical stage, with major investments and new applications announced every other day. Some experts are calling for a moratorium on the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. Legislators globally compete to set the blueprint for a new regulatory regime. This paper analyses the most advanced legal proposal, the European Union's AI Act currently in the stage of final "trilogue" negotiations between the EU institutions. This legislation will likely have extra-territorial implications, sometimes called "the Brussels effect". It also constitutes a radical departure from conventional information and communications technology policy by regulating AI ex-ante through a risk-based approach that seeks to prevent certain harmful outcomes based on product safety principles. We offer a review and critique, specifically discussing the AI Act's problematic obligations regarding data quality and human oversight. Our proposal is to take liability seriously as the key regulatory mechanism. This signals to industry that if a breach of law occurs, firms are required to know in particular what their inputs were and how to retrain the system to remedy the breach. Moreover, we suggest differentiating between endogenous and exogenous sources of potential harm, which can be mitigated by carefully allocating liability between developers and deployers of AI technology

Immaterialgüterrecht und Entwicklung

Der Beitrag stellt im Überblick dar, welche Bedeutung das Immaterialgüterrecht (IP) für die Entwicklung einzelner Volkswirtschaften und die globale Wissensgesellschaft hat. In einem ersten Abschnitt wird erläutert, dass in der Geschichte des Immaterialgüterrechts die Vorstellung dominierte, dass Immaterialgüterrechte technologischem und sonstigem Fortschritt zuträglich sind. Im zweiten Abschnitt wird gezeigt, dass dieses lineare Expansions-Narrativ aus ökonomischer und wirtschaftshistorischer Sicht als widerlegt gelten muss. Dazu werden die Argumente der IP-Optimisten und die Gegenargumente der IP-Pessimisten anhand empirischer Studien bewertet. Der Beitrag schließt mit sozialwissenschaftlichen und normativen Schlussfolgerungen im Hinblick auf die künftige Ausgestaltung des internationalen Immaterialgüterrechts.The article gives an overview of the relationship between intellectual property (IP) and development. The first section shows that the dominant assumption in the history of IP was that IP rights are generally favorable to socio-economic progress. The second section explains that economic and historical research has proven this linear expansionist narrative to be untenable. In doing so, the article compares the arguments of IP optimists with counterarguments of IP pessimists in light of empirical studies. The final section addresses the consequences of these findings for the future of the international IP system

Scaling by Optimising: Modularisation of Data Curation Services in Growing Organisations

After a century of theorising and applying management practices, we are in the middle of entering a new stage in management science: digital management. The management of digital data submerges in traditional functions of management and, at the same time, continues to recreate viable solutions and conceptualisations in its established fields, e.g. research data management. Yet, one can observe bilateral synergies and mutual enrichment of traditional and data management practices in all fields. The paper at hand addresses a case in point, in which new and old management practices amalgamate to meet a steadily, in part characterised by leaps and bounds, increasing demand of data curation services in academic institutions. The idea of modularisation, as known from software engineering, is applied to data curation workflows so that economies of scale and scope can be used. While scaling refers to both management science and data science, optimising is understood in the traditional managerial sense, that is, with respect to the cost function. By means of a situation analysis describing how data curation services were applied from one department to the entire institution and an analysis of the factors of influence, a method of modularisation is outlined that converges to an optimal state of curation workflows

Ein wissenschaftliches Kommunikationssystem ohne Verlage : zur rechtlichen Implementierung von Open Access als Goldstandard wissenschaftlichen Publizierens

Sowohl die exklusive Vermarktung steuerfinanzierter wissenschaftlicher Werke durch Verlage als auch das Wissenschaftsurheberrecht stehen seit längerem in der Kritik. Die Open-Access-Bewegung tritt dafür ein, dass überwiegend öffentlich geförderte wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse frei im Internet verfügbar sein sollen. Die Implementierung dieses Ideals stößt aber auf erhebliche Beharrungskräfte. Deshalb gehen öffentliche Forschungsförderer vermehrt dazu über, Wissenschaftler zu Open-Access-Publikationen zu verpflichten. Der Beitrag skizziert die rechtlichen Maßnahmen, die ergriffen werden müssten, um Open Access zum Goldstandard der wissenschaftlichen Veröffentlichung zu küren. Ferner geht der Beitrag der Frage nach, ob ein solches Regelwerk Grundrechte der Verlage und der Wissenschaftler verletzen würde.The exclusive commercialization of publicly funded scholarship by publishers as well as copyright norms that support this business model have been subject to criticism for some time. The Open Access movement claims that publicly funded research should be freely available on the internet. However, the implementation of this ideal encounters significant resistance in the academic community. As a reaction, more and more funding agencies tend to demand Open Access publications. The article develops a model of how to legally implement and enforce an obligation to make Open Access the gold standard in academic publishing. Furthermore, the article asks whether such a framework would violate fundamental rights of publishers and researchers

Das Verhältnis zwischen Urheberrecht und Wissenschaft: auf die Perspektive kommt es an!

Seit dem Einzug der digitalen Netzwerktechnologie ist das Urheberrecht zu einem heftig umkämpften Politikum geworden. Dies gilt auch im Hinblick auf „Wissenschaft“ als urheberrechtlichen Schutzgegenstand. Ob das Verhältnis zwischen Urheberrecht und Wissenschaft allerdings überhaupt als problematisch erscheint und welche Lösungsansätze für einen ggf. wahrgenommenen Konflikt präferiert werden, hängt maßgeblich von der Perspektive ab. Der Beitrag unterscheidet insoweit eine urheberrechtliche von einer wissenschaftstheoretisch/-soziologischen Betrachtungsweise. Es zeigt sich, dass nur Letztere geeignet ist, den gegenwärtig stattfindenden, grundlegenden Wandel des wissenschaftlichen Kommunikationssystems zu erklären und adäquate Regulierungsvorschläge zu entwickeln.Since the advent of digital network technologies, copyright has become a highly contentious political matter. This is also true in the area of scientific works and the scholarly communication system in general. However, whether the relationship between copyright and scholarship is considered problematic and which, if any, alternative approaches to the current system are preferred, depends upon the perspective. In that regard, the article distinguishes a copyright perspective from a perspective that takes as its starting point the philosophy and sociology of science. The article shows that only the latter, scientific perspective is capable of explaining and adequately regulating the current, fundamental change taking place in the scholarly communication system