Intellectual property rights and global warming

Derclaye, Estelle

Abstract

The issue of global warming is everywhere. Not only does the topic fill the pages and screens of all media, e.g. newspapers and reviews or films , it also regularly and increasingly occupies private companies , economists , lawyers , scientists and politicians alike. It even interests the museums. Global warming, which is mainly caused by the increase of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere , or most of global warming at least, is, it seems, the result of human activity. But human activity is far from new. What is new is a certain type of human activity. Human activity linked to industrial development, and therefore progress. The question then arises: could intellectual property rights (IPR) be the cause of global warming? After all, the industrial revolution has brought with it intellectual property rights, among the most relevant ones, rights to protect inventions. And the primary aim of patent law is to give an incentive to inventors to invent new products, processes and machines. Copyright law’s rationale is similar. Some of the greatest inventions of the two last centuries include the car, the train, the plane, the fridge, the computer and with them the use of energy, generally, oil and coal, to make them work. They are some of the causes that contribute the most to the increase of levels of CO2 in the planet’s atmosphere. For instance, a third of carbon dioxide emissions in the European Union (EU) is generated by transport. The intellectual property academic community has so far paid very little attention, if any, to this increasingly important issue.

Citation

Derclaye, E. (2008). Intellectual property rights and global warming

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2008
• Deposit Date: Nov 15, 2012
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 2, 2022
• Journal: Marquette Intellectual Property Review
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 12
• Issue: 2
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1015714
• Publisher URL: http://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/iplr/vol12/iss2/2/