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Intellectual property (IP), intellectual property rights

Intellectual property rights create private boundaries of ownership around the public goods of information and knowledge. These rights have globalized and now permeate industry, agriculture and services affecting, amongst other things, who extracts the most value from global production chains, who has access to medicines, which technical standards will come to be adopted in information technology markets, the capacity of second generation innovators to threaten incumbents, the evolution of digital networks and services, the structure of seed markets, the price of textbooks, and the rights to experiment with culture. At the most fundamental level globalized intellectual property rights function as a private tax affecting the rate of diffusion of knowledge that in turn impacts on equality. Over the years members of the Law Department have explored different aspects of intellectual property rights, including digital rights management, open source, creative commons, and the relationship between intellectual property and competition law. In addition to these areas, current themes of interest include open access initiatives, intellectual property, technology and the green economy, intellectual property and human rights, intellectual property in trade agreements, intellectual property and the global investment regime and the role of intellectual property in knowledge governance.