Kritika: Essays on Intellectual Property, Volume 6

The fields of intellectual property have broadened and deepened in so many ways that commentators struggle to keep up with the ceaseless rush of developments and hot topics. Kritika: Essays on Intellectual Property is a series that is designed to help authors escape this rush. It creates a forum for authors who wish to more deeply question, investigate and reflect upon the evolving themes and principles of the discipline.

The essays in this 6th volume in the series draw new lines of research, reaching from investigating into the imperfections of technology markets and ways to overcome them, to the complexity of the multiple interacting factors determining the needs and uses of intellectual property that reveals the futility of any wholesale assessment; from the dysfunctional attribution of rights of exploitation for patents resulting from publicly funded research, to the extension of patentability to aesthetic subject matter in the era of digitalization; from the ambivalent effects that philanthropic sponsorship of access to medicines may produce on creating a domestic pharmaceutical industry and infrastructure, to the expansion of protection of regulatory data by the rules on market authorization of pharmaceuticals; and finally, from the impact of technological change on the societal perception and the concepts of copyright, to that which artificial intelligence may eventually have on the very foundations of patent protection as an incentive for investment in innovation.