What’s Mine is Mine, Because it’s Better if it’s Mine: A Defense of a Utilitarian Incentives-Based Account of Intellectual Property Rights by Jeffrey Grinde

What’s Mine is Mine, Because it’s Better if it’s Mine: A Defense of a Utilitarian Incentives-Based Account of Intellectual Property Rights by Jeffrey Grinde

Philosophy

Intellectual property (IP) rights have been codified into law ever since we have thought about intellectual property. What we want is a theory that grounds our right to intellectual property. Upon examination of historical precedents of thinking about IP rights, it becomes clear that to say we have a right to IP, what we really mean is that we have three sub-rights to IP. These three sub-rights are the right to own IP, the right to profit from one's IP, and the right to be recognized for one's own IP. There are three competing theories that ground these three sub-rights: the personality-based theory, the Lockean theory, and the rule/incentives-based theory. My argument is that whichever of the three theories best grounds the three sub-rights to IP is the theory that we ought to accept. Of the three theories, the rule/incentives-based theory best grounds the three IP right; hence, we ought to accept the rule/incentives-based theory as the justificatory account of IP rights. The following paper is a defense of the argument.

Grinde, Jeffrey

Ripon College Oral presentation

Ripon College

April 19, 2016

The author reserves all rights.

pdf

Majors: Philosophy, Chemistry-Biology

Ripon, WI

Philosophy 491 - Senior Seminar