Freedom to conduct a business, competition and intellectual property

Di seguito l’abstract del saggio dei Proff. Gustavo Ghidini e Andrea Stazi pubblicato in “Research Handbook On Human Rights And Intellectual Property“, volume a cura di Christophe Geiger (Edward Elgar) The purpose of the chapter is to explore in systemic and logical terms the relation between the ‘freedom to conduct a business’ and the entitlement and exercise of intellectual property rights. As convenient to a reconstruction that, while directed to an international audience, implies the reference to constitutional laws and IP regimes which can vary from one legal order to another, the authors focus on such basic normative tenets that, on both fronts, can be considered as a common ground (thus also a conceptual lingua franca) of market economies and democratic societies. Basic tenets whose foundations were laid by the ‘dual revolution’that, in Europe as in the US, crowned theAge of the Enlightenment. The outlined reconstruction of the relation between the freedom to conduct a business and the entitlement and exercise of IPRs within (and in coherence with) an institutional framework of freedom of competition, reflects the functional framing of IPRs as instruments of the exercise of the freedom to conduct a business, i.e. of free economic initiative. 25 febbraio 2015