The Value of the Right to Exclude: An Empirical Assessment

markdownabstractProperty theorists have long deemed the right to exclude fundamental and essential for the efficient use and allocation of property. Recently, however, proponents of the progressive property movement have called into question the centrality of the right to exclude, suggesting that it should be scaled back to allow the advancement of more socially beneficial uses of property. Surprisingly, the debate between the opponents and detractors of the right to exclude is devoid of any empirical evidence. The actual value of the right to exclude remains unknown. In this Article, we set out to fill this void by measuring, for the first time, the value of the right to exclude. To that end, we use the passage of the Countryside and Rights of Way Act in England and Wales in 2000 as a natural experiment to provide some empirical insight on this issue. We show that the Act’s passage led to statistically significant and substantively large declines in property values in areas of England and Wales that were more intensively affected by the Act relative to areas where less land was designated for increased access. While property prices may not capture all social value, our findings provide a critical input to the debate regarding access to private property. Given that the access rights provided by the “right to roam” included in the Act represent seemingly minimal intrusions on private property, our findings indicate that property owners view even small restrictions on their right to exclude very negatively. We believe that our findings are of significant importance to lawmakers in the U.S. as they provide an empirical basis for policymaking in the realms of property and land use. In the U.S., private property rights enjoy constitutional protection under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. Hence, any attempt to formalize a general right to roam or other intrusions on the right to exclude may require the government to pay just compensation to affected property owners. Our study suggests what the compensation amounts are likely to be. This information would allow law-makers to make better decisions about the social desirability of various land use measures. We would like to emphasize that our findings should not be read as a call against the adoption of a right to roam, or any other public privilege. Our only goal is to furnish a much needed empirical foundation that would permit law-makers to conduct a more precise cost-benefit analysis of different policies

A study of patent thickets

Report analysing whether entry of UK enterprises into patenting in a technology area is affected by patent thickets in the technology area

Intellectual Property, Open Science and Research Biobanks

In biomedical research and translational medicine, the ancient war between exclusivity (private control over information) and access to information is proposing again on a new battlefield: research biobanks. The latter are becoming increasingly important (one of the ten ideas changing the world, according to Time magazine) since they allow to collect, store and distribute in a secure and professional way a critical mass of human biological samples for research purposes. Tissues and related data are fundamental for the development of the biomedical research and the emerging field of translational medicine: they represent the “raw material” for every kind of biomedical study. For this reason, it is crucial to understand the boundaries of Intellectual Property (IP) in this prickly context. In fact, both data sharing and collaborative research have become an imperative in contemporary open science, whose development depends inextricably on: the opportunities to access and use data, the possibility of sharing practices between communities, the cross-checking of information and results and, chiefly, interactions with experts in different fields of knowledge. Data sharing allows both to spread the costs of analytical results that researchers cannot achieve working individually and, if properly managed, to avoid the duplication of research. These advantages are crucial: access to a common pool of pre-competitive data and the possibility to endorse follow-on research projects are fundamental for the progress of biomedicine. This is why the "open movement" is also spreading in the biobank's field. After an overview of the complex interactions among the different stakeholders involved in the process of information and data production, as well as of the main obstacles to the promotion of data sharing (i.e., the appropriability of biological samples and information, the privacy of participants, the lack of interoperability), we will firstly clarify some blurring in language, in particular concerning concepts often mixed up, such as “open source” and “open access”. The aim is to understand whether and to what extent we can apply these concepts to the biomedical field. Afterwards, adopting a comparative perspective, we will analyze the main features of the open models – in particular, the Open Research Data model – which have been proposed in literature for the promotion of data sharing in the field of research biobanks. After such an analysis, we will suggest some recommendations in order to rebalance the clash between exclusivity - the paradigm characterizing the evolution of intellectual property over the last three centuries - and the actual needs for access to knowledge. We argue that the key factor in this balance may come from the right interaction between IP, social norms and contracts. In particular, we need to combine the incentives and the reward mechanisms characterizing scientific communities with data sharing imperative