Intellectual Property and Theories of Justice

Axel Gosseries, Alain Marciano and Alain Strowel

In this volume, fourteen philosophers, economists and legal scholars and one computer scientist address various facets of the same question: under which conditions (if any) can intellectual property rights be fair? This general question unfolds in a variety of others: What are the parallels and differences between intellectual and real property? Are libertarian theories especially sympathetic to IP rights? Should Rawlsian support copyright? How can a concern for incentives be taken into account by each of the main theories of justice? What's exactly wrong with free-riding, when dealing with non-rival goods? This requires a close examination of a variety of specific issues such as peer-to-peer file sharing, access to vital medicines, the interaction between copyright and freedom of expression, patents on genes, etc. It also involves bringing together state-of-the-art knowledge on legal, economic and technical issues with the most advanced state of our normative theories.



AXEL GOSSERIES is a Permanent Research Fellow at the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research, based at the Chaire Hoover in economic and social ethics, University of Louvain, Belgium. His work in moral and political philosophy focuses more specifically on theories of intergenerational
justice, tradable quotas schemes and the idea of workplace democracy. He is the author of Penser
la justice entre les générations (2004).
 
ALAIN MARCIANO is an Associate Professor at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne, France. He is the author of La philosophie économique and Éthiques de l'économie and a co-editor of the Elgar Companion to Economics and Philosophy and one of the main editors of the Review
of Economic Philosophy.

ALAIN STROWEL is a Professor at Saint-Louis University (FUSL, Brussels), the University of Liège and the Catholic University of Brussels-Leuven, Belgium, where he teaches copyright, design and media law. He is the author of Droit d'auteur et copyright (1993) and Droit d'auteur et numérique: logiciels, bases de données, multimédia (2001).

réf : E046 - 2008 (296 pages), Palgrave Macmillan ; ISBN : 9780230007093