City Research Online

Abstract

It seems, once again, that intellectual property law is shifting beneath our feet. As Robert Merges put it a decade ago, if IP were a city, then the old city centre is today ‘surrounded by new buildings and new neighbourhoods, knots of urban growth, budding in every direction, far off into the distance’.1 That old city centre was built during the nineteenth-century age of possessive individualism.2 Ideologies of the romantic author and sole inventor helped erect the city’s foundational principle that one deserves ownership in the products of mental labour.3 Yet, in the early twentieth century, US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis could still write that ‘the general rule of law is, that the noblest of human production – knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas – become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use’.4 A century later, that general rule rings less true.5 Investment-driven rights, and investment-driven extensions to old rights, have helped expand the city’s boundaries. What started out as a small cadre of related rights, sui generis rights, and quasi-IP rights now contribute to an urban sprawl of new neighbourhoods spreading as far as the eye can see. New denizens – the trivially creative and insignificantly innovative goods explored in this volume – now are protected inside the city’s walls. What was the city of Intellectual Property has become the city of Investment Property.

Publication Type:	Book Section
Additional Information:	This material has been published in revised form in The Cambridge Handbook of Investment-Driven Intellectual Property edited by Enrico Bonadio and Patrick Goold, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108989527.025. This version is free to view and download for private research and study only. Not for re-distribution or re-use. © Cambridge University Press
Subjects:	K Law > K Law (General)
Departments:	The City Law School > Academic Programmes

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