Kritika: Essays on Intellectual Property, Volume 1

The field of intellectual property has broadened and deepened in so many ways, and at such pace, that there is a tendency for academic commentators to focus on the next new thing, or to react immediately to judicial developments, rather than to reflect more deeply on the greater themes of the discipline.

The Kritika: Essays on Intellectual Property series is a series of books that are designed to fulfill this role by creating a forum for essays that take a critical, long-term approach to the field of intellectual property. Breaking down the barriers of specialization, and laying the foundation for an emergent critical scholarship, this first book in the series brings together the leading scholars in the field to reflect deeply on the current state and future of their discipline.

With a view to setting in train a process of emergent critical scholarship, this inaugural volume of Kritika brings together leading scholars from the different fields of the discipline, reflecting on the private regulatory power of patents; the role of competition law in the search for the holy grail of balance in IP; the fictions of patent law; the anthropological relativism of IP; the historical transmission processes behind the IP concept; the vanishing paradigm of exclusivity in a digital environment; models of inclusive patents serving open innovation; and the rhetoric behind the copyright ratchet.