Intellectual Property's Negative Space: Beyond the Utilitarian
Abstract
A growing body of scholarship addresses intellectual property’s “negative spaces”: areas in which creation and innovation thrive without significant formal protection from intellectual property law. Negative space scholars have, for the most part, taken a utilitarian approach, using case studies to examine the relationship between negative spaces and economic incentives for creation and innovation. For a full understanding of intellectual property’s negative spaces, however, we must examine them not only as they relate to incentive and efficiency considerations, but also as they relate to alternative conceptions of intellectual property, such as those based on labor-desert, personality, and distributive justice theories. This paper undertakes such an examination. The result suggests areas of misalignment between traditional intellectual property rights and remedies and the interests of many creators and innovators.
Keywords
intellectual property, IP theory, negative space, utilitarian, labor-desert, locke, personality theory, Hegel, distributive justice, social planning
Publication Date
2013
Document Type
Article
Repository Citation
Rosenblatt, Elizabeth L., "Intellectual Property's Negative Space: Beyond the Utilitarian" (2013). Faculty Publications. 2219.
https://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/faculty_publications/2219
