Property
3 writings
The Invented Inventor: Adapting Intellectual Property to Generative AI
Under review
As AI increasingly drives discovery, the concept of inventor faces severe strain. Recent judicial decisions, such as the Swiss Federal Administrative Court’s 2025 DABUS ruling, expose a deepening tension: courts demand intellectual creation by a natural person even as human contributions to AI-assisted discovery become increasingly nominal. This paper approaches the resulting tension from the standpoint of political philosophy rather than jurisprudence: the strain AI places on the concept of inventorship is too fundamental to be resolved by interpretative methods taking existing conceptual architectures for granted. Inspired by Hume’s genealogy of property, the paper reconstructs the historical “need matrices” that forged the concept of inventorship, tracing its evolution from Venetian guild economics through Romantic genius ideology to corporate R&D. This reveals the concept to be an overburdened bundle serving four social functions: incentivising innovation, disseminating knowledge, legitimating monopolies, and resolving priority disputes. It also clarifies the mismatch between the concept and the emerging realities of AI-driven discovery. To resolve this mismatch, we must disaggregate the concept of inventorship and develop specialised conceptual resources for each of these functions. If we invented the notion of inventor to perform certain functions, we can reinvent it to perform them better.
Download PDF
Making Past Thinkers Speak to Us Through Pragmatic Genealogies
In Historiography and the Formation of Philosophical Canons. Sandra Lapointe and Erich Reck (eds.), 171–191. New York: Routledge. 2023. doi:10.4324/9781003184294-9
Instead of treating Hobbes and Hume as answering the same questions we ask today, this article proposes that we start from the practical predicaments their political concepts addressed in their own time. Hume’s account of property and Hobbes’s account of sovereign power are reconstructed as historically local, yet structurally revealing, responses to predicaments—over conflict, security, and cooperation—that still structure our political life.
Download PDF
The Double Nature of DNA: Reevaluating the Common Heritage Idea
The Journal of Political Philosophy 24 (1): 47–66. 2016. doi:10.1111/jopp.12063
Addresses the political and legal conflict over gene patenting by reevaluating the influential idea that the human genome is the “common heritage of mankind.” Argues that the human genome is best understood not as a form of shared property, but as a repository of information to which we have a fiduciary relationship, which creates duties of preservation and access. This “preservationist heritage idea” largely dissolves the conflict with the patenting of genes themselves, though it also reveals how recent court decisions still make room for the patenting of commercially relevant molecules deriving from human DNA.
Download PDF