The fields of intellectual property have broadened and deepened in so many ways that commentators struggle to keep up with the ceaseless rush of developments and hot topics. Kritika: Essays on Intellectual Property is a series that is designed to help authors escape this rush. It creates a forum for authors who wish to more deeply question, investigate and reflect upon the evolving themes and principles of the discipline.With a view to setting in train a process of emergent critical scholarship, this inaugural volume of Kritika brings together leading scholars from the different fields of the discipline, reflecting on the private regulatory power of patents; the role of competition law in the search for the holy grail of balance in IP; the fictions of patent law; the anthropological relativism of IP; the historical transmission processes behind the IP concept; the vanishing paradigm of exclusivity in a digital environment; models of inclusive patents serving open innovation; and the rhetoric behind the copyright ratchet.

Contributors: F.M. Abbott, S. Anderman, C.M. Correa, M. Forsyth, A. Peukert, M. Ricolfi, G. Van Overwalle, P.K. Yu