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1 - Knowledge Governance: An Analytical Approach and its Policy Implications

from Part I - Knowledge Governance: Building a Framework

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2013

Leonardo Burlamaqui
Affiliation:
Ford Foundation and State University of Rio de Janeiro
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Summary

Introduction

The field of knowledge is the common property of mankind

—Thomas Jefferson

Why did Schumpeter neglect intellectual property rights? For contemporary Schumpeterians, this question, posed by Mark Blaug in 2005, could be seen as an embarrassing one. How could the “father” of competition by means of innovations manage to miss completely the analysis and discussion of what in today's scholarship is one of the most – if not the most – influential incentive for corporations to innovate continuously? Blaug's own answer to that question is very direct, sharp and does not embarrass at all. It also calls attention to the central issue discussed in this chapter:

It never occurred to anyone before, say the 1980s, that such disparate phenomena as patents for mechanical inventions, industrial products and processes (now extended to biotechnology, algorithms and even business methods), copyrights for the expression of literacy and artistic expressions in fixed form and trademarks and trade names for distinctive services, could be generalized under the heading of property rights, all conferred by the legal system in relation to discrete items of information resulting from some sort of appropriate intellectual activity.

(Blaug 2005, 71–2; italics added)

For the purposes of the argument I will develop in this chapter, there are two crucial elements implicit in Blaug's answer. First, that at the time Schumpeter was writing Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, the balance between private interests and the public domain was completely different from what it has become today.

Type
Chapter
Information
Knowledge Governance
Reasserting the Public Interest
, pp. 3 - 26
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2012

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