| In an opening vignette to an otherwise insightful article, Carol M. Rose (2003) compares people who hold intellectual property rights to poor villagers in India. They put effort and time into developing small but productive properties, only to have the wild tiger or rogue elephant of the public domain trample them or eat them up. In extreme cases, IP "villages" are abandoned and left to "the jungle" of public property. But Rose neglects another part of the story, and that is that the villagers are also hungry, and while they do not directly consume tigers, they do consume the environment a tiger needs to survive. This paper argues, from the perspective of legal pluralism, that both private and public properties are voracious. In recent western... |
