IPRs as Private Rights: National Policies and Social Values
摘要
As civil law rights, IPRs exist to create differentiated protections over intangible properties. IP, in modern Romance languages, including Intellectual Property in English, Propriété Intellectual in French, and Gestiges Eigentum in German, all refer to ownership over property knowledge or intellect. The practice of classifying all rights relating to intellectual activities as ‘intellectual property rights’ was first seen in the works of German scholar Benedikt Carpzov (1595–1666) in the middle of the seventeenth century. This concept was later developed by Edmond Picard (1836–1924), a Belgian jurist. Picard believed that IPRs fall into a distinctive domain of civil law rights, one that is fundamentally different from the ownership over corporeal things.