What rights should owners enjoy with respect to their property? Should these property rights be adjusted to accommodate the onset of the age of information? And if so, how should property rights be adjusted? This dissertation examines these questions in three related yet separate articles.;The first article, Appropriability and Property, argues that property regimes were set up to solve a discrete set of problems, most prominent of which is the appropriability problem---the problem of corrupt incentives that would result if owners were not able to enjoy the fruit of their investment in their property. The article lays out a comprehensive theory of property and property rights that revolves around the appropriability problem, and argues that a proper focus on appropriability lends much credence to traditional, asset-centric models of property rights, while undermining more recent models that view property rights as an indeterminate bundle of use-rights that is constantly re-shaped through contractual mechanisms. Moreover; the article argues that once the determinate nature of ownership is properly understood, the role of property law within the legal system and in relation to contract doctrine becomes significantly clearer.;The second and third articles represent different levels of implementation of the appropriability-based theory of property. The second article, Appropriability, First Sale and Exhaustion, applies the appropriability model to an analysis of the exhaustion/first sale doctrine in intellectual property. The article examines the history of the exhaustion/first sale doctrine and demonstrates how different courts have characterized the doctrine as either a property/appropriability doctrine or a quasi-antitrust doctrine, and how this confusion in the courts has plagued the doctrine and turned it into dead letter for over 15 years. The article then shows that the abandonment of the doctrine would create significant doctrinal problems, while contributing little (if anything) to the goals of intellectual property.;The third article, The Right of Integrity in Software: an Economic Analysis, deals with one discrete instance in which a copyright owner---Microsoft Corp.---sought to protect the integrity of its software through the mechanism of copyright licensing. The article analyzes Microsoft's argument, relevant precedent, and the economic rationales for a right of integrity, and develops certain tests that courts could apply to determine whether a right of integrity should be recognized with respect to certain new subject matter. Thus, the article gives a roadmap of the sort of analysis that should be applied to determine whether, in a novel situation, intellectual property rights should be expanded to offer the rights holder additional protection.
展开▼
