Property Rules Research Articles

How is technological change affecting the nature of the corporation?

This paper examines how the ‘digital revolution’ (enabled by exponential increases in processing power and connectivity) is bringing about fundamental changes to the size and scope of firms, and to how they are organised and managed. The large, vertically integrated firms of the industrial era are being superseded by narrower, more specialised, firms that link buyers and sellers through digital ‘platforms’. The traditional bureaucratic ways of organising that were invented in the industrial era are gradually being replaced with flatter and more fluid ways of organising. The consequences of these changes are discussed, with a particular focus on public policy. Many of the current tensions between governments and big digital firms—for example, in terms of competition policy, intellectual property rules, and labour laws—are the result of a disconnect between regulations developed during the industrial era and the demands of firms operating by digital era norms. The paper identifies opportunities for institutional innovations to resolve these tensions.

Raz jeszcze o odpowiedzialności za przywłaszczenie przedmiotu wchodzącego do majątku wspólnego małżonków

The legal assessment of misappropriation of property belonging to community property by one of the spouses constitutes a heavily contested issue in criminal law. The article analyzes a well-established opinion, according to which such property can be the object of the crime of misappropriation, and which cites the rules of the civil law. The article focuses on the issue of the possibility of assuming in such cases an attack on property, i.e. a violation of the object of the offence, discussed from the perspective of family law, which allows spouses to dispose of such property without the permission of the other spouse, on the basis of the rule of independent property management. Moreover, the author verifies the prerequisite for the seizure of third-party property, given that the property in question belongs also to the defendant, in accordance with the rules of community property. In addition to that, the author discusses the issue of meeting the prerequisites for the subjective aspect and the rule for evaluating the damage inflicted by the offence. The latter issue has been identified as particularly controversial, given that determining the scope of the possible restitution claims according to the value of property which constitutes the object of the offence in a situation where the property belongs also to the defendant is contrary to the intuition of criminal law scholars.

El aparato teórico en la estructura tradicional del sistema de propiedad intelectual

<p>Lo que conocemos hoy como el sistema de propiedad intelectual es un complejo entramado de explicaciones y reglas que tuvieron su origen en el contexto histórico y filosófico particular del siglo XVIII. De esta forma el positivismo y el formalismo jurídicos amoldaron sus herramientas para poder comprender a las creaciones e invenciones humanas como un tipo de derecho de propiedad. Como resultado de este proceso de adaptación encontramos que la estructura tradicional del sistema de propiedad intelectual obedece a la misma estructura básica de la propiedad, en la que su característica más relevante es la regla de propiedad respecto de este tipo de derechos subjetivos: exclusivos – excluyentes. </p>

Protecting Related Creations to Fashion in the Framework of Literary and Artistic Property Rights of Iran and France

In today’s world where the process of development and the industry is evolving more rapidly than expected, the legal notions are going forward on their compliance in line with these developments. The increasing development of intellectual property rights and their samples is an example of this change. One of the most important issues and instances of this tendency in legal rights is associated with fashion productions and creations. France, as one of the greatest leading country in fashion industry since long time ago, has legally protected the dress and beautiful creations in the intellectual property rules and in the different time periods, under the various titles, including the drawings and models rights, industrial property rights, literary and artistic property rights. French jurisprudence has broadly interpreted the concept of the fashion industry and consequently, the dress and beauty creations that have evolved not only the goods, but all parties involved in the production of the fashion industry. In Iranian law also, although there is no progress in this field compared to French law, with an optimistic interpretation of the rules of its intellectual property, it can be associated with Droit d'-auteur rules in addition to the industrial property rights under different titles such as design and drawings, Applied artwork, folklore etc.

A Critique of the Jurisprudence Emerging from KenyaaS Courts in the Post-2010 Dispensation on the Intersection between the Right to Private Land and Right to Housing, and Whether Kenyan Courts Have Appreciated the Demands of Property Theory During an Era of Transformative Constitutionalism

Andre van de Walt in Property in the Margins (Hart Publishing 2009) argues that in a transformative constitutional dispensation, constitutionally imposed social and economic reform agenda leads to a tension between the constitutional obligation to protect existing property rights and the duty to promote social and economic reform that inevitably affects existing property interests. The resulting collision between the constitutional commitment to bring about change and the “normal” tendency of law to entrench the status quo and protect existing property holdings will often be accommodated in a doctrinal shift or qualification that explains and recognises the resulting restrictions, without compromising the system of property rules and practices or the foundations of the property regime as such. Thus in the transformative era the understanding of property theory does not fit within the framework of the “normal” adjudication of property disputes and the transformation of property law or property holdings will sometimes entail questioning or reconsidering the very foundations of property law.

Mega-regional trade Agreements: Costly distractions for developing countries?

This paper examines the relationship between mega-regional trade Agreements and diet-related health given that such Agreements aim to liberalize “substantially all trade and investment” that could potentially impact on health through tariff elimination and stronger intellectual property commitments in partner countries. We analyse two interlinked policy concerns: first, how tariff reduction/elimination under mega-regional Agreements impact on the production of sugar? Second, how mega-regional Agreements with Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS)-style and TRIPS-plus commitments modify intellectual property rules among partner countries and impact on developing countries’ access to life-saving drugs and medicines? Using a dynamic Global Trade Analysis Project model, we find there are significant health consequences of trade commitments undertaken by developing countries with potential detrimental health effect on populations such that first, higher production of sugar alters consumption trends. Second, despite stricter intellectual property rules, which result in net global gains, developing countries suffer from the regulatory chill effect.

Mind the Gap! How the Digital Turn Upsets Intellectual Property.

Intellectual property is one of the highly divisive issues in contemporary philosophical and political debates. The main objective of this paper is to explore some sources of tension between the formal rules of intellectual property (particularly copyright and patents) and the emerging informal norms of file sharing and open access in online environments. We look into the file sharing phenomena not only to illustrate the deepening gap between the two sets of norms, but to cast some doubt on the current regime of intellectual property as an adequate frame for the new type of interactions in online environments. Revisiting the classic Arrow-Demsetz debate about intellectual property and the epistemological issues involved in assessing institutions, we suggest that seeking out new institutional arrangements aligned with the norms-in-use seems to be a more promising strategy in the new technological setting than attempting to reinforce the current legal framework. Moreover, such a strategy is less prone to committing the so-called 'Nirvana fallacies'. As a secondary task, we try to cast some doubt on the two most common moral justifications of intellectual property as being able to ground the full extent of the current intellectual property regime.

Biological novelty in the anthropocene

It is well known that humans are creating new variants of organisms, ecosystems and landscapes. Here I argue that the degree of biological novelty generated by humans goes deeper than that. We use property rules to create exclusivity in cooperation among humans, and between humans and other biological entities, thus overcoming social dilemmas and breaking barriers to cooperation. This is leading to novel forms of cooperation. One of them is the human control, modification and replication of whole ecosystems. For the first time, there exist ecosystems with functional design, division of labor and unlimited heredity. We use mental representation and language as new mechanisms of inheritance and modification that apply to an increasing variety of biological and non-biological entities. As a result, the speed, depth and scale of biological innovation are unprecedented in the history of life.

Coproduction of property rights: The management of watercourses in pre-modern Bohemia

The structure of ownership is recognized as a key factor for economic and social development. The traditional approach suggests that new property rights emerge when it becomes profitable to invest in their production. I extend this idea by arguing that simply defining new property rules is not enough for new rights to develop effectively, and that enforcement of those rules is just as important. Identifying and implementing an optimal combination of definition and enforcement activities then becomes the central issue in the development of property rights. I illustrate the application of this theory with a detailed study of the evolution of water rights in pre-modern Bohemia.

Privacy and Spouses in Louisiana: The Community Property Conundrum and Proposals for Reform

Since Warren and Brandeis first expounded on the right of privacy in 1890, individuals' legal ability to protect themselves from unreasonable intrusions upon their seclusion has grown through both jurisprudence and statutes. While privacy rights on a national level have developed, community property laws in Louisiana have not evolved to ensure similar protections for intra-spousal privacy rights. One reason Louisiana law has not progressed in this respect is because privacy rights create a conundrum for community property: how can spouses share property with one another as part of the community, yet still retain a right of privacy from one another in that property? Community property ownership, management, and debt rules cause consternation for Louisiana courts considering an individual spouse's right of privacy. Two Louisiana courts have held that community property rules trump a spouse's right of privacy. Thus, while intra-spousal privacy rights have developed on a national level, an individual spouse's privacy rights in Louisiana have remained stagnant. This Article seeks to provide guidance to the Louisiana legislature and courts as to how to amend current community property law so as to give spouses a reasonable right of privacy from one another in community property.

Fetishism and Financialization

The capitalist system is based on property rules, which are the same for all forms of property. Yet these rules operate differently for capital and labor as distinct forms of property. This paradox obscures the role of living labor as the source of surplus value, and hence mystifies money as self-expanding value. This “fetishism of money” facilitates “financialization,” prevents accurate analysis of the capitalist system, and the formulation of alternatives.

Globalization, institutions, and income convergence

The income convergence literature suggests that poor countries or regions can catch up to rich ones conditional on sharing certain characteristics with rich countries or regions. Good institutions such as strong property rights and rule of law are key among those characteristics. Globalization provides opportunities for agents in poor economies to learn about and experi-ment with institutional innovations across regions. We estimate the relationship between glob-alization and cross-country income convergence using a panel of up to 184 countries covering 1970 to 2009. We employ the KOF index of globalization and control for measures of political and economic institutional quality. A standard deviation increase in the KOF index is associ-ated with a country closing the gap between its income per capita level and that of the richest country by an additional 13.6% annually.

Natural resource governance in lower Omo, Ethiopia – negotiation processes instead of property rights and rules?

Research on common-pool resources in the last 30 years has hinged on concepts such as rules and property rights for understanding how access and use of natural resources is managed by communities and other actors. However, a small body of literature on mobile pastoralism maintains that resource governance might not always be based on resource-related rules, but instead on negotiation and general norms of reciprocity. Situations conventionally labelled as ‘open access’ might therefore not always be as unregulated and unmanaged as they seem. Here, we examine what the absence of rules for resource access and use means in practice, and how resource users adapt such a governance system to increasing scarcity of pasture land. We conducted interviews, group discussions and participatory mapping exercises in two neighbouring areas, Hamar and Bashada, in the lower Omo area in southern Ethiopia. Both groups are culturally closely related to each other, but showed important differences in their ability and willingness to change their institutions to adapt to resource scarcity. In both Hamar and Bashada, access to grazing was generally non-exclusive. Instead, we found a complex mosaic of ways in which access to grazing was practiced and sanctioned, characterised largely by negotiations and interplay between individual actors rather than by firm rules. Both groups were confronted with increasingly erratic rainfalls and insufficient availability of pasture. Strikingly, while the Bashada had recently established a strictly enforced set-aside area to provide grazing for the end of the dry season, the Hamar rejected such ideas and sought grazing in protected areas, which eventually led to conflict between herders and authorities. Reasons for these diverging strategies might be connected to subtle differences in the degree to which decision-making is individualised and social coordination accepted. These seem to have important implications for community adaptability to changing environmental and societal conditions.

Trade, Public Health, and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

This paper reflects on the role of trade policy and trade rules in delivering on two key policy challenges in global public health: improving innovation in the healthcare industry and securing access to the goods and services required to deliver on the 2030 Agenda’s ambitious health objectives. The paper reviews the role of a range of trade policy tools, including intellectual property rules, subsidies and tariffs, in the achievement of each of these challenges and articulates options policymakers could consider as they assess how to shape trade policy to support the 2030 Agenda. Many of these options relate to the reform of multilateral trade agreements under the World Trade Organization.

The Entrepreneurial Commons: Reframing the Relationship Between Intellectual Property and Entrepreneurship

Framing the relationship between intellectual property and entrepreneurship in the terms described here leads both to a positive and normative research agenda. As a descriptive matter, there is much to be gained from systematically studying these questions in a variety of different contexts. Indeed, a fuller picture of the relationship requires numerous case studies of different firms and different industries. From this descriptive knowledge base, normative conclusions about changes to our intellectual property laws and rules that would benefit entrepreneurs can more readily and justifiably be drawn.

Property in Bribes Revisited in a Cross-Disciplinary Perspective

Taking its point of departure from the decision of the United Kingdom Supreme Court in FHR European Ventures, this article seeks to bring cross-disciplinary perspectives to bear on the question whether an agent should hold the bribe he has received on constructive trust for his principal. Economising models are employed and the results interpreted by reference to the Calabresi and Melamed tripartite scheme of property rule, liability rule and inalienable right. The results are at least three-fold. First, an effective legal rule responding to the problem of harm caused by corruption must recognise and take account of differences between competitive and non-competitive environments and auditing or monitoring possibilities. Second, a property rule fails to do that. Third, ignoring such endogenous and exogenous variables, it overestimates or underestimates the harm suffered by victims of corruption.

Promoting healthcare innovation on the demand side.

Innovation policy often focuses on fortifying the incentives of firms that develop and sell new products by offering them lucrative rights to exclude competitors from the market. Regulators also rely on these same firms—and on similar incentives—to develop information about the effects of their products in patients, despite their obvious conflict of interest. The result may be a distorted understanding that leads to overuse of expensive new medical technologies. Recent technological advances have put healthcare payers in an excellent position to play a larger role in future innovation to improve healthcare and reduce its costs. Insurance companies and integrated healthcare providers have custody of treasure troves of data about healthcare provision and outcomes that can yield valuable insights about the effects of medical treatment without the need to conduct costly clinical trials. Some integrated healthcare systems have seized upon this advantage to make notable discoveries about the effects of particular products that have changed the standard of care. Moreover, to the extent that healthcare payers can profit from reducing costs, they will seek to avoid inappropriate use of costly technologies. Greater involvement of payers in healthcare innovation thus offers a potential counterweight to the incentives of product sellers to promote excessive use of costly new products. In recent years, the federal government has sought to promote innovation through analysis of healthcare records in a series of initiatives; some picture insurers as passive data repositories, while others provide opportunities for insurers to take a more active role in innovation. In this paper, we examine the role of health insurers in developing new knowledge about the provision and effects of healthcare—what we call ‘demand-side innovation’. We address the contours of this underexplored area of innovation and describe the behavior of participating firms. We examine the effects of current legal rules on demand-side innovation, including insurance regulation, intellectual property rules, privacy protections, and FDA regulation of new healthcare technologies. Throughout, we highlight many policy tools that government can use and is using to facilitate payer innovation outside the traditional toolkit of patents and exclusive rights.

M\xe9xico and the TPP: a critical view on diversification and intellectual property

The Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement was signed on February 4, 2016. The published text confirmed some fears but also brought relief as the details of what had been negotiated became publicly known. This paper attempts to contribute to the discussion with a critical view of the Agreement, although not necessarily in equivalence to US President-elect Donald Trump negative stand, but one of a developing country. The main argument holds that joining the TPP, or any other agreement alike, is not advisable unless Mexican industries are in a condition to compete. The line of reasoning is double-faceted: First, gains from the alleged diversification are insignificant, so handing over policy autonomy for development in exchange for access to negligible markets is not beneficial; second, its strong intellectual property rules would further hinder the policy space of the government for designing and implementing domestic science, technology and innovation programs. This would place Mexico at a disadvantage with regard to its prospects for a higher position in global production and value chains, not to mention develop full production chains led by national firms. As it is presently formulated, the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement would consolidate a structure of dependence and income inequality, two problems which Mexico is striving to overcome.

Association Rules Mining and Statistic Test over Multiple Datasets on TCM Drug Pairs

Objective: TCM drug pair is consisted of two and only two drugs, which is the smallest drug group following special drug compatibility regulations. Formulae compatibility regulations are one of the most important problems in TCM clinical practice and modern research but still not quite resolved. TCM drug pair was a very suitable objects to discovery the complicated formulae compatibility regulations. This paper applied association rules mining to study the structural characters of TCM drug pairs find some special relationships between drugs. This study might give some help to the research on the formulae compatibility regulations. Methods: We presented an enhanced association rules mining method to find out the property associations between two drugs in TCM drug pairs. And a binominal statistic test was introduced to get the statistical significance of rules mined. The property data from the 625 drug pairs containing 347 drugs were collected and analyzed. As most association rules mining run only in single database, the new method was proposed to find rules over multiple databases (2 in this paper standing for the two drugs in TCM drug pairs) based on a first Apriori algorithm mining. Then statistic test was applied to filter out insignificant rules furthermore. Results: Apriori algorithm and the new method were applied to mine association rules on TCM drug pairs for comparison. The rules found by Apriori method showed false high support, part of which came from the property associations within one drug but not between the two drugs in TCM drug pairs. And Apriori method could not found the association of replicated property, such as liver - liver rules. The new method proposed could get the only associations between drugs even those replicated property rules. Some associations were mined with high supports and significances. Conclusion: This paper proposed an enhanced method to perform association rules mining over multiple databases. After comparison with Apriori algorithm the new method could just obtain the associations in which each item came from different database. The method was confirmed to be quite suitable on mining over multiple databases. The statistic test was also necessary to exclude false association rules.

Directly Managing Earnings by Deviating from Clear-Cut Property, Plant and Equipment (PPE) Impairment Rules

Mapping reported PPE impairment amounts (i.e. write-downs and reversals) to only valid directions in legitimate triggers specified under benchmark impairment rules (IAS 36 and SFAS #144), I investigate whether managers’ impairment decisions are justified. Finding evidence of nonconformity to rules, I quantify this as ORAI (i.e. opportunistic reporting of asset impairment) and document that target beating, smoothing, small profits, and other managerial intents drive ORAI while governance mechanisms mitigate it. I find evidence of ‘earnings management (EM) planning’ in jurisdictions allowing both write-downs and reversals such that the write-down tool achieves downward EM in period t but is followed in future periods by upward EM achieved via the reversal tool. I consider this as incremental contribution to literature, but a more novel contribution which this study brings is the linking of managers’ reversals decisions to impairment rules to detect impairment rules deviators.