Introduction
The term ‘intellectual property rights’ denotes a set of legal doctrines - namely patent, copyright, trademark and trade secret - that differ in their structure, scope and spheres of application, but nevertheless have in common the feature of granting the owner rights over the economic exploitation of an idea or its ‘reification’ (that is, its expression in any tangible medium, as in the case of copyright-authors’ rights).
Such rights are generally exclusive, meaning that the owner is given a legal monopoly over the protected idea.2 From this perspective, therefore, and despite the distinct peculiarities of each, the roots of all intellectual property rights can be traced to the advent of a knowledge economy and the private appropriation of certain types of information. In fact, as the production of knowledge began generating increasing value, in tangible economic terms as well as socially, the question arose as to the appropriability of this new knowledge - or more to the point of the benefits derived therefrom - which was resolved in Western commercial and industrial societies through the attribution of specific property rights. In this respect, intellectual property rights are only one possible solution to the dilemma of the ownership of knowledge.3Different societies have resolved this dilemma in different ways.4 Of the various possible solutions, those adopted by Western society are especially propitious to the circulation of knowledge within economic contexts and its exploitation in the marketplace.5 Moreover, it has the effect of specifically stimulating the production of those ideas that the market most readily rewards. Hence, the traditional benefit associated with intellectual property rights, at least from the law and economics perspective, is that it provides an incentive for the creation and/or dissemination of new ideas. But intellectual property rights have yet another feature in common, one that is often neglected in the literature, but central to the economic analysis: namely that, by the very fact of being property rights, they contribute by definition to shaping the market structure, regulating the competitive scenario and determining the rational behaviours of economic agents.
In other words, property rights are not merely static instruments for finetuning the market of ideas; they are much more pervasive in their effects, able to shape the features of markets and bring about the emergence of particular actors, with a sometimes significant impact on creative and inventive processes, as well as on innovation. In the present discussion we shall give equal weight to both perspectives, starting from the traditional analysis and its sources, and then addressing the indirect economic effects on the configuration of the markets. More specifically, the next section will describe the origins of the economic interpretation of intellectual property, presenting the traditional ‘static’ paradigm. The following sections will discuss, in turn, the application of this paradigm to the various specific rights, illustrating their peculiar features, and the ‘dynamic’ role of intellectual property rights, showing how these institutions play a decisive role in shaping the markets of ideas. The next section proposes some directions for future development that are currently being explored, albeit fragmentarily, by the contemporary scientific debate, and the final section concludes.