Proprietarian Intellectual Property Rights

Abstract

In Chapter 1 we argued that there are four main principles now running through debates and policy on genetic resource control. The most significant of these is the proprietarian intellectual property principle. The last decade has seen an unprecedented extension of intellectual property both in terms of its geographical reach and in terms of the extension of patents into new types of organism. In this chapter we analyse and evaluate the driving principle behind these developments – that of proprietarian intellectual property rights.