93:3 July 2010
Intellectual Property

Advisory Editor: Richard Davies, University of Bergamo

Your university library’s copy of The Monist is the property of the library. If you take it home without permission, you have stolen it. Even if you merely photocopy an article from this copy, you may have breached the intellectual property rights of publisher and author. While the library owns one copy of the journal, the journal seems to ‘own’ the content. Something similar holds, too, of other reproducible products of human ingenuity such as digital images, music, movies, and software. This issue of The Monist is devoted to questions such as: What are the objects and property-relations involved in such cases? What ontological categories (particular vs. universal; concrete vs abstract; tokens vs types) are in play here, and what are their identity conditions? How do such entities begin to exist or go out of existence? What is ‘managed’ by digital rights management, and what is ‘identified’ by digital object identifiers? When does quoting, sampling or reverse engineering becomes piracy? How is copying related to faking, forging and counterfeiting, and what roles do notions such as ‘resemblance’ and ‘intention to mislead’ have in these cases? How does the value and meaning (economic, aesthetic or even religious) we attribute to an artefact (be it a banknote, a painting or a supposed relic) depend on how we relate it to its source?

Table of Contents:

Richard Davies

Intellectual Propriety

Rita Risser

Determinism, Creative Works and Proprietorship

Paul Taylor

Images and Stories

Laura Biron

Two Challenges to the Idea of Intellectual Property

Andrea Bottani

Intellectual Property as a Kind of Metaproperty

Massimiliano Carrara and Marzia Soavi

Copies, Replicas and Counterfeits of Artworks and Artifacts

Michael Wreen

The Ontology of Intellectual Property

James Wilson

Ontology and the Regulation of Intellectual Property

Jonathan Trerise

Against the Strength of Patent Protection

David Koepsell

Authorship and Artifacts: Remaking IP Law for Future Objects