System Of Property Rights Research Articles

Intellectual Property Rights in Nigerian Business Environment: Challenges and Prospects

The intellectual property rights system is key to protect assets of micro, small and medium enterprises. Protecting an invention is one of the key roles that intellectual property rights plays in innovative business ventures. To remain ahead of competitors, entrepreneurs must either continuously introduce innovative products and services or make improvements to the quality of existing products and services. The author of this research study found out that intellectual property rights protect innovations, encourage research and development (R&D) and boost profits of micro, small and medium enterprises, however, there are numerous challenges in the enforcement of intellectual property rights such as counterfeit products which are abundant in the Nigerian market.

Groundwater use in the Eagle Ford Shale: some policy recommendations

Advances in hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and horizontal drilling have allowed oil and gas companies to tap into Texas’ previously inaccessible shale reserves. Fracking in the state has grown at an exponential rate and is not expected to decline until 2025. Fracking requires the consumption of vast amounts of groundwater, a resource that is already strained. This study quantifies the water consumption associated with fracking in the Eagle Ford Shale, evaluates the current regulatory framework, and proposes 3 policy recommendations. The data show that fracking has become the primary consumer of groundwater in the most active counties within the Eagle Ford. Our study proposes 3 policy solutions to ensure that groundwater is consumed in an economically efficient manner in these areas. These solutions are a more thorough system for reporting consumption, tax incentives for oil and gas companies to use substitutes for fresh groundwater, and an alternative property rights system to the current rule of capture system. Citation: Steadman M, Arnett B, Healy K, Jiang Z, David LeClere, Leslie McLaughlin, Roberts J. 2015. Groundwater use in the Eagle Ford Shale: some policy recommendations. Texas Water Journal. 6(1):67-78. Available from: https://doi.org/10.21423/twj.v6i1.7023.

Indigenous Knowledge, South-South Exchange of New Technologies and a Warped Intellectual Property Rights System

In this paper I analyse the contribution of new technologies in sustainable development and poverty alleviation in the global South. My research design is desktop analysis based on a theoretical communication model of the knowledge and communication interface. I present an analysis of the possibilities that exist in South-South exchange of indigenous knowledge using the new technologies, defined as the modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), to address problems of poverty and sustainability. I also give an example of a programme in India that has successfully attempted this. In this paper I employ qualitative method of analysis. I find that there is great potential in South-South exchange of new technologies to address problems of poverty and sustainability. In the same breath, however, I contend that there are substantial challenges that the Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) system poses to this exchange. I conclude that the exchange is sustainable only to the extent that the South is able to push for the revision of the world trade organisation IPRs regime to avoid appropriation of one of its greatest assets, namely indigenous knowledge. In this paper I recommend that the South should be unflinching in its quest for a fair IPR system.

Meaningful Consent: The Economics of Privity in Networked Environments

Recent work on privacy (e.g. WEIS 2013/4, Meaningful Consent in the Digital Economy project) recognises the unanticipated consequences of data-centred legal protections in a world of shifting relations between data and human actors. But the rules have not caught up with these changes, and the irreversible consequences of ‘make do and mend’ are not often taken into account when changing policy.Many of the most-protected ‘personal’ data are not personal at all, but are created to facilitate the operation of larger (e.g. administrative, economic, transport) systems or inadvertently generated by using such systems. The protection given to such data typically rests on notions of informed consent even in circumstances where such consent may be difficult to define, harder to give and nearly impossible to certify in meaningful ways. Such protections typically involve a mix of data collection, access and processing rules that are either imposed on behalf of individuals or are to be exercised by them. This approach adequately protects some personal interests, but not all – and is definitely not future-proof. Boundaries between allowing individuals to discover and pursue their interests on one side and behavioural manipulation on the other are often blurred. The costs (psychological and behavioural as well as economic and practical) of exercising control over one’s data are rarely taken into account as some instances of the Right to be Forgotten illustrate. The purposes for which privacy rights were constructed are often forgotten, or have not been reinterpreted in a world of ubiquitous monitoring data, multi-person ‘private exchanges,’ and multiple pathways through which data can be used to create and to capture value. Moreover, the parties who should be involved in making decisions – those connected by a network of informational relationships – are often not in contractual, practical or legal contact. These developments, associated with e.g. the Internet of Things, Cloud computing and big data analytics, should be recognised as challenging privacy rules and, more fundamentally, the adequacy of informed consent (e.g. to access specified data for specified purposes) as a means of managing innovative, flexible, and complex informational architectures. This paper presents a framework for organising these challenges using them to evaluate proposed policies, specifically in relation to complex, automated, automatic or autonomous data collection, processing and use. It argues for a movement away from a system of property rights based on individual consent to a values-based ‘privity’ regime – a collection of differentiated (relational as well as property) rights and consents that may be better able to accommodate innovations. Privity regimes (see deFillipis 2006) bundle together rights regarding e.g. confidential disclosure with ‘standing’ or voice options in relation to informational linkages. The impacts are examined through a game-theoretic comparison between the proposed privity regime and existing privacy rights in personal data markets that include: conventional ‘behavioural profiling’ and search; situations where third parties may have complementary roles conflicting interests in such data and where data have value in relation both to specific individuals and to larger groups (e.g. ‘real-world’ health data); n-sided markets on data platforms (including social and crowd-sourcing platforms with long and short memories); and the use of ‘privity-like’ rights inherited by data objects and by autonomous systems whose ownership may be shared among many people.

Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Innovation Contests

Economic research on innovation has long discussed which policy instruments best foster innovativeness in individuals and organizations. One of the instruments easily accessible to policy-makers is innovation contests; however, there is ambiguous empirical evidence concerning how such contests should be designed. Our experimental study provides evidence by analyzing the effects of two different innovation contests on subjects’ innovativeness: a prize for the aggregate innovativeness and a prize for the best innovation. We implement a creative real effort task simulating a sequential innovation process, whereby subjects determine royalty fees for their created products, which also serve as a measure of cooperation. We find that both contest conditions reduce the willingness to cooperate between subjects compared to a benchmark condition without an innovation contest. However, the total innovation activity is not influenced by introducing innovation contest schemes. From a policy perspective, the implementation of state-subsidized innovation contests in addition to the existing intellectual property rights system should be questioned.

Social Norms, the Invisible Hand, and the Law

Social norms can be oppressive or empowering; and so can laws. Norms are sometimes described as emergent rules or behavioural regularities that arise as solutions to collective action problems of various kinds faced by individuals when they interact with each other. Examples include rules of combat, courtship rituals, and informal systems of property rights that determine what members of a group can do with the food they gather and the objects they create, or whom they can marry.

The Practice and Reconstruction of Village Communal Ownership: An Analytical Framework for Collective Forest Tenure Disputes in China

As shown in the many disputes occurring in reforms to collective forest tenure, reforms aimed at clarifying property rights that follow the contract responsibility system for arable land are not wholly compatible with the informal system of property rights followed in village communities up to the present. This highlights the fact that the existing theory of collective property rights no longer provides a sufficient or effective interpretation of the property rights game in the practice of collective forest tenure. Further, the existing institutional arrangements for collective property rights are conducive neither to the resolution of disputes over forest tenure nor to the sustainable management and utilization of forest land. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a more inclusive analytical framework for rural property rights: village communal ownership. This highlights the village community as the main force in the practice of property rights and integrates the communal ownership values accumulated and inherited in the course of village transition. The introduction of a rational mechanism developed through the practice of village communal ownership may be able to further improve and encourage the reform of rural property rights in China, leading to the construction of a modern system of rural property rights involving clear title to the land.

Redevelopment of urban village in China – A step towards an effective urban policy? A case study of Liede village in Guangzhou

Urban regeneration is a complicated process as it involves a lot of parties each with different interests and agendas. Regeneration of urban villages is an even more intricate issue in China due to the dual systems of property rights over urban and rural land. While a lot of attention has been given to the governance structure applied to the regeneration process, this paper tries to analyze the changing ideological foundation for local authorities in China to execute such regeneration in a more efficient and less costly way. By a detailed case study of Liede Village in Guangzhou, we find that local authorities in China are willing to explore neoliberal approach in coordinating with market forces in the process of regeneration. The results in this case study are promising as all parties involved got what they wanted from the regeneration scheme. However, one should not be mistaken that this is a paradigm shift in the governance ideology. We expect that such progress to take place only in a gradual manner when circumstances in the market and socio-political environments allow it to proceed further, a situation not dissimilar with how ships advance gradually in a canal via various locks. We coin this situation in this paper a “locks analogy”.

In defense of profit-seeking

Purpose – Profits have a bad press. They are associated in the public mind with greed, avarice, self-seeking. The purpose of this paper is to make the case in behalf of profit-seeking, so as to right the balance of publications on this topic. Design/methodology/approach – The authors undertake an economic analysis of the phenomenon of profit-seeking. The paper explores how profits lead to resource allocation, wealth creation, the promotion of human welfare and well-being. Findings – The paper finds that the system of profit and loss, part and parcel of economic freedom and laissez faire capitalism, does indeed promote wealth. It is the last best chance to fight poverty. Contrary to the views of the economically illiterate, it does not cause inflation or the business cycle nor any other economic malady. Originality/value – We cannot give ourselves good marks as to originality. Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard beat us to the punch as to the benefits of the profit and loss private property rights system. However, as Friedrich Hayek said each generation must fight these battles in its own context. So, the authors claim value for this paper, since it confronts more modern criticisms, and addresses more recent contexts.

A Numerus Clausus Principle for Intellectual Property

Real property can only be held and conveyed in a small number of forms, such as fee simple, life estate, and lease. This principle is known as numerus clausus, meaning “the number is closed.” For centuries, the principle has been central to the common-law system of property rights. Scholars have justified it as a mechanism for facilitating effective property alienation, maintaining low transaction costs in the buying and selling of property, and keeping the scope of property owners’ rights clear. In contrast, the numerus clausus principle is essentially nonexistent in intellectual property law. In the context of patents and copyrights, “the number is open.” There is nearly no limit to the ways in which intellectual objects can be licensed and sold. This Article will argue that the numerus clausus principle should extend to intellectual property. The justifications for the numerus clausus principle in real property law are even more persuasive in the intellectual property context because the scope of intellectual property rights is more difficult to delineate than the scope of real property rights. The metaphysical nature of intellectual property prevents protected objects from being clearly identifiable, particularly in a patent context, where inventions can be independently created by multiple parties. As a result, investigating the sale and licensing history of a work or invention — and whether a work or invention is protected at all — is difficult, costly, and sometimes impossible. This difficulty is compounded by the absence of numerus clausus, which permits inscrutable licensing and sale agreements and allows single works to be carved into several parts and burdened by complicated usage rules. By considering examples of digital content licensing and fragmentation of particular copyrights, this Article will identify how a numerus clausus principle for intellectual property would facilitate the use and conveyance of intellectual property. This principle would benefit intellectual property owners, licensees, and the general public by lowering transaction costs and preventing accidental overuse and underuse of intellectual works.

Institutional change, fishing rights and governance mechanisms: The dynamics of the Spanish 300 fleet on the Grand Sole fishing grounds

The “Spanish 300 Fleet” on the Grand Sole fishing grounds has been one of the most important fleets in Europe for decades. This paper analyses the process of institutional change that has determined the governance mechanisms and the property-rights system in the case of the Spanish 300 fleet. It studies the centralized top-to-bottom process of institutional change that has included some relevant legal norms such as the approval of the compatibility of the vessel scrapping grants while retaining ownership of the fishing rights, the transferability of rights and lastly the implementation of ITQs in 2007, among other changes. This evolution of the governance mechanisms has facilitated the modernization and size adjustment of this fleet, which has been oversized for the fishing opportunities provided by the TACs. The paper explains how this process of institutional change has implied a reduction of the “300 fleet” to a 100 fleet while shedding light on the relationships between institutional change, governance mechanisms and the property-rights system in this case of fisheries management.

What Makes Socio-ecological Systems Robust? An Institutional Analysis of the 2,000 Year-Old Ifugao Society

Scholars have often puzzled over why ancient socio-ecological systems (SES) have collapsed or survived overtime. This paper examines the case of the 2,000-year old Ifugao SES in the northern Philippines and the contemporary challenges they now face. Five observations can be drawn. First, the Ifugao case does not fit some of the conventional theoretical explanations for the collapse or survival of SES. Second, the Ifugao’s primogeniture system of property rights along with the their customary laws and practices have played important roles in maintaining the robustness of their SES through their effects on ecological integrity. Third, the Ifugao SES today is faced with contemporary challenges with varying effects on its robustness: integration into a post-colonial social order, the effects of tourism and agricultural development, migration, urbanization and the introduction of Christianity and mass education. Fourth, despite these changes, it is not a certainty that the Ifugao will shift to a new domain of attraction that cannot support a human population, or that will induce a transition that causes long-term human suffering. Finally, the Ifugao case study adds to our understanding of robust SES.

Crimes and Transactions

Professor Finkelstein's paper focuses on perhaps the most basic question one could ask about the criminal law: What explains the existence of the criminal category, as distinct from other kinds of mischief? Assuming that society has good reason to deter mischievous conduct or to sanction those responsible for it, we might still ask why either goal should require a distinctively criminal category. The problem was brought to contemporary prominence by Robert Nozick, who, in Anarchy, State and Utopia,1 asked: Why not simply compensate? If we begin with the (contestable) premise that every kind of wrong that we might want to deter or to sanction consists in a rights violation, then the question is, why don't we simply have a scheme in which those who are the victims of rights violations secure compensation from those who have wronged them? In the language of the law, why not torts alone? While a variety of plausible responses have been offered (beginning with Nozick's own), the question poses a particularly acute challenge for those who defend an economic analysis of the law. Since they seek to explain the law in terms of a relatively narrow range of concepts, these theorists find their explanatory resources correspondingly limited; they cannot avail themselves of the most familiar philosophical solutions. Roughly, they have proposed the following sort of account. We begin with a system of property rights or entitlements; the justification for having any such set of entitlements is to be conceived of in economic terms. For example, ownership encourages investment and reduces uncertainty; for those and other reasons, ownership is wealth enhancing or productive. The degree to which a system of property ownership can be efficient is limited, however, since having a right to something does not yet permit one to alienate it. Without the right to alienate, individuals may be unable to make mutually advantageous-and therefore efficient-exchanges. Thus, it is desirable (in economic terms) to supplement the scheme of initial

Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene

The advent of farming around 12 millennia ago was a cultural as well as technological revolution, requiring a new system of property rights. Among mobile hunter-gatherers during the late Pleistocene, food was almost certainly widely shared as it was acquired. If a harvested crop or the meat of a domesticated animal were to have been distributed to other group members, a late Pleistocene would-be farmer would have had little incentive to engage in the required investments in clearing, cultivation, animal tending, and storage. However, the new property rights that farming required--secure individual claims to the products of one's labor--were infeasible because most of the mobile and dispersed resources of a forager economy could not cost-effectively be delimited and defended. The resulting chicken-and-egg puzzle might be resolved if farming had been much more productive than foraging, but initially it was not. Our model and simulations explain how, despite being an unlikely event, farming and a new system of farming-friendly property rights nonetheless jointly emerged when they did. This Holocene revolution was not sparked by a superior technology. It occurred because possession of the wealth of farmers--crops, dwellings, and animals--could be unambiguously demarcated and defended. This facilitated the spread of new property rights that were advantageous to the groups adopting them. Our results thus challenge unicausal models of historical dynamics driven by advances in technology, population pressure, or other exogenous changes. Our approach may be applied to other technological and institutional revolutions such as the 18th- and 19th-century industrial revolution and the information revolution today.

Fusion of Horizons: A New Perspective on Intellectual Property Rights

The mission of legal philosophy and philosophical hermeneutics has always been to comprehend the nature of intellectual property rights and the intellectual property rights system for the purpose of improving them. The difficulty of this task lies in the limitations in legal thinking resulting from the division of labor in the legal profession. A clear perception of the nature of intellectual property rights and the intellectual property rights system can only be obtained when we transcend intellectual property rights law. If we adopt the thinking of legal philosophy and the logic of dialectics to analyze the intellectual property rights system and explore the differing nature of institutional structures and their interrelationships, we can show that the intellectual property rights system is essentially an institutional arrangement involving balancing different considerations and implying a high level of political intellect. Only when intellectual property rights legislation possesses this kind of wisdom will people voluntarily abide by its rules in their life and work.

The Re-Emerging Role of the State in Contemporary Russia

I examine ownership structure of Russian firms during the 1998–2006 period, where a greater emphasis is placed on motivations behind increased government ownership in the latter years, when oligarchs’ opportunistic influence on the firm diminished as state ownership correspondingly increased. As this phenomenon is also correlated with improved corporate growth during the period, I argue that state participation in corporate governance acted as an effective substitute mechanism to constrain wealth-tunnelling behaviour of corporate insiders and local bureaucrats in a country defined by a weak property rights system.

Comments: Unfounded Fears

Editor's column Oil and gas industry leaders seem to be in universal agreement that the industry is getting a raw deal from public and political fears about hydraulic fracturing. Now there seems to be a growing consensus that the industry must be more proactive in explaining shale production procedures and must really make an effort to address some of the questions surrounding risk. In recent speeches and panel presentations at conferences and public events, industry leaders and energy ministers are lauding the potential of natural gas, based in part on the phenomenal success of the US shale experience. Major company forecasts see hydrocarbons meeting global demand through 2030 and beyond, with natural gas gaining in consumption at the expense of oil and coal. The industry is still absorbing the outlook for gas production in the US, which is now considering gas exports given the production success and the low cost of gas in the country. “We probably do not have 100 years’, we probably have 200 years’ supply,” said G. Steven Farris, chief executive officer of Apache, in a speech at the annual IHS CERA Week energy conference in Houston. “What is really happening with respect to hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling is that we have opened up areas of rock that have never been able to produce and that has tremendous impact on the reserves of natural gas.” But there are potential roadblocks to a new global gas revolution fueled by growth in unconventionals. One is how replicable the US shale experience is in countries that do not have the same system of property rights. A second is the price disconnect between oil and gas, particularly in the US, although that issue might be solved as liquefied natural gas trade grows, making gas less a regional product and more open to the international market. The third is rapidly causing more concern in the industry: how to persuade a skeptical public that the tools, technologies, and practices the industry uses in producing shale are safe or least worth the risk. At the fifth International Petroleum Technology Conference (IPTC), held in February in Bangkok, Thailand, energy ministers and representatives of national oil companies, international oil companies, and the service sector spoke about the danger of losing the public relations war on hydraulic fracturing and shale production. During an IPTC panel session, Martin Stauble, vice president of gas at Shell China E&P, said that the industry must work closely with communities where unconventional projects are taking place, and that it needs to be transparent with the public on how operations will be conducted and what will be involved. Another panelist, Jean-Marie Guillermou, senior vice president of Asia Pacific E&P at Total, said that, “Our industry needs to demonstrate that we can properly manage these projects and that they are beneficial for the stakeholders.” Panelist Hinda Gharbi, president of Schlumberger Asia, called for more use of “green” fluids in fracturing projects and a smaller environmental footprint. Many educational efforts are under way. 2012 SPE President Ganesh Thakur examined some of these issues in his President’s column in JPT last month. And in this JPT issue, George E. King of Apache does a masterful job of examining the charges against hydraulic fracturing, the facts and hyperbole, and the real risks involved. Guillermou, speaking at IPTC, summed up the issue this way. “We have to explain, explain, explain. The main issue today is how to win the confidence of public opinion.”

Human Rights Approach to the Protection of Traditional Knowledge: An Appraisal of Draft Nordic Saami Convention

Abstract Traditional knowledge offfers significant contribution to the intellectual creations. While authors of intellectual creations are protected within the intellectual property rights regime, the authors of traditional knowledge, however, are not. Intellectual property rights regime offfers certain exclusive rights over the innovations of private authors leaving holders of traditional knowledge aside. Given the collective nature of knowledge held traditionally by a community, and unknown in the intellectual property rights system, traditional knowledge faces complexity to be included within the existing intellectual property rights system, and hence, demands alternative protection regime. This article argues human rights approach as an alternative protection regime for the traditional knowledge – the knowledge mostly held by the indigenous communities. The article examines specific human rights provisions embodied in the international bill of human rights pertaining to both right to enjoy a culture and right to enjoy ‘moral and material’ interests arguing that traditional knowledge form a part of culture, and that such culture-oriented right generates economic interests akin to that of intellectual property right system, albeit within the framework of human rights. While the Saami are the indigenous people holding diverse traditional knowledge of great importance, the article also addresses the specific provisions of the Draft Nordic Saami Convention in order to examine how efffectively the Saami’s traditional knowledge right is protected within the regime of human rights.

Houses as ATMs? Mortgage Refinancing and Macroeconomic Uncertainty

This paper constructs a theory of land market activity in settings where there is uncertainty and private information about the security of land tenure. Land sellers match with buyers in a competitive search environment, and an illiquid land market emerges as a screening mechanism. As a consequence, adverse selection and an insecure system of property rights stifle land market transactions. As a useful application of the model, I analyze the relationships between the characteristics of the land market and labour flows between agricultural and off-farm employment. Empirical analysis using household level data from Indonesia provides credence to the proposed mechanism. Difference-in-difference estimation and probit analysis show that formally titled land is actively traded, while untitled land is less liquid. This is consistent with the theory given that possession of a legal land certificate improves ownership security, and ac- cess to a land registry reduces the asymmetry of information. Additional implications of the theory are verified empirically by studying the differences between markets for unregistered land across Indonesian provinces.

Whither Corporate Russia?

Using firm-level information obtained from the Russian Trading System stock exchange from 1998 through 2006, we estimate growth performance of the Russian corporate sector. We find consistently improving growth, and note that higher growth performance is correlated with greater partial state re-acquisition and state corporate governance presence. We argue that the latter served, not only to safeguard against misappropriation of firm assets and government subsidies, but also to discourage managers from opting for shorter than optimal investment durations. Thus state corporate-governance strategy may serve as a second best policy to a more developed property rights system.