Steven Wilf (University of Connecticut School of Law) has posted Intellectual Property and Human Rights (The Routledge History of Human Rights (ed. Jean H. Quataert and Lora Wildenthal), Routledge Press, 2019) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Intellectual Property and Human Rights constitute two comprehensive, expansive, and previously unrelated legal regimes that increasingly have become intertwined over the past few decades. Both are grounded in rights discourse (property or human dignity foundations), often are moored by international agreements such as conventions and international trade treaties, rely upon institutions of global governance, and have rapidly, often in vertiginous fashion expanded the scope of their legal reach to new subjects and across international borders. The interface between the two regimes has become a rights thicket. Which set of rights should trump? And—as an animated academic and policy debate has queried--are IP and human rights complimentary or competing systems?
Analysis of the jostling between intellectual property and human rights has previously focused on recent interactions. This chapter is the first sustained examination of their encounters from the eighteenth century to our own times. Both are rights-based regimes. But human rights tends to resolve conflicts by seeing rights as legal trumps while intellectual property generally balances competing rights claims.
