Philosophical Perspectives on Intellectual Property Law

ABSTRACT

Intellectual property (IP) law shapes how knowledge, culture, and innovation are created, shared, and valued, yet philosophical reflection on it has fallen behind its rapid development. Generative AI has made the gap visible: it opens policy vacuums that cannot be filled until the concepts beneath them are clarified. Rather than a historical overview, this article offers a systematic reconstruction organized around three questions that any IP regime must answer about itself. Why is the restriction IP imposes justified? Who may claim it? And what, exactly, does it protect? These are the questions of value, authorship, and ontology, and they are minimal: no regime can be stated without answering all three. I begin with value, distinguishing optimistic strategies that justify IP's liberty‐restricting privileges—consequentialist, deontological, and, more recently, virtue‐based—from global and local skeptical positions, including communitarian reframings that contest the terms of the question. I then turn to authorship, and to the pressure that collective and machine production place on the traditional individualistic and human‐centered assumptions of copyright. Finally, I discuss ontology, comparing descriptive type‐based models with revisionary accounts that ground IP in concrete artifacts.