Research Progress

Intellectual property (IP) rights impact innovation in diverse ways. This book critically analyses whether additional rights beyond patents, trademarks and copyrights are needed to promote innovation. Featuring contributions from thought-leaders in the field of IP, this book examines the check and balances that already exist in the IP system to safeguard innovation and questions to what extent existing IP regimes are capable of catering to new paradigms of innovation and creativity.

Taking a multi-angled view of the topic, this book questions whether IP rights by definition encourage innovation and explores the role of exceptions and limitations to IP rights as well as the application of competition law to promote innovation. Chapters analyse diverse topics within the field of IP such as plant varieties protection, geographical indications and 3D printing. Taken as a whole this book advocates that a pro-innovation rationale must be applied when new IP legislation is designed.

This book will be an engaging source of information for researchers and policy-makers with an interest in the direction of IP legislation and the promotion of innovation. It will also be relevant for scholars of competition law who are seeking information on the relationship between competition and IP.

The intention of this chapter is to formulate thought-provoking ideas about legitimacy and close neighbor terms. In particular, the chapter considers “legitimacy” to not only be a very relevant term for business ethics in general but also highly relevant in answering the question of how business ethics relates to law. Rather than defining legitimacy right away, the authors use the first part of this chapter to develop a comprehensive understanding of legitimacy by relating it to close neighbor terms, such as power, recognition, trust, justification, and criticism, on the one hand, and to legality in its contrast to and overlap with legitimacy, on the other. In the second part of this chapter, we offer concrete (real-world) examples and ideas of the interaction between legitimacy and law. These examples are drawn from traditional legal disciplines such as tax law and human rights law, as well as more modern legal preoccupations such as intellectual property law, laws relating to artificial intelligence and autonomous cars, the latest organic seed certification laws, etc. We envisage these examples as food-for-thought for future business ethics teaching and research at the interface of legitimacy and legality and business ethics and its legal contexts.