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Cosmopolitan Legalism Meets ‘Thin Community’: Problems in the Global Governance of Intellectual Property

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Christopher May
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Abstract

The making of knowledge and information into property, through intellectual property rights (IPRs) has commonly been justified using a set of cosmopolitan norms. These norms of justification have been extensively deployed within the structures of global governance for IPRs. However, the political community that underpins such norms in national jurisdictions is lacking at the global level. Many of the political problems now recognized with the globalized protection of IPRs stem from this tension between cosmopolitan legalism and the contemporary ‘thin’ global community.

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Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , 2004 , pp. 393 - 422
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 2004

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References

1 This paper was originally prepared for the panel on the Governance of Global Issues: Effectiveness, Accountability and Constitutionalisation, at the European Consortium for Political Research, joint sessions of workshops, University of Edinburgh, 2003. I thank the participants there for their comments that helped improve the focus of the argument presented here. Two referees for Government and Opposition also provided excellent advice regarding the clarification of key points and I acknowledge their help, while noting that all remaining shortcomings are my own.

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4 Space precludes a full typology of IPRs to be set out here, but see May, A Global Political Economy of Intellectual Property Rights, op. cit., pp. 6–11, for a fuller treatment. Where aspects of specific forms of intellectual property are important for the argument below they are covered in the discussion.

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