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Abstract
In an opening vignette to an otherwise insightful article, Carol M. Rose (2003) compares
people who hold intellectual property rights to poor villagers in India. They put effort and time
into developing small but productive properties, only to have the wild tiger or rogue elephant of
the public domain trample them or eat them up. In extreme cases, IP "villages" are abandoned
and left to "the jungle" of public property. But Rose neglects another part of the story, and that is
that the villagers are also hungry, and while they do not directly consume tigers, they do consume
the environment a tiger needs to survive. This paper argues, from the perspective of legal
pluralism, that both private and public properties are voracious. In recent western developments,
they each expand by trying to 'eating the other up'. Western property theory promotes this
dualistic game of voracious property types. In exporting this game world wide through
privatization, international agreements and regulations many other more balanced approaches to
property, which fall between the public/private divide, are being consumed as well (as in kin
group corporate property, cultural property etc.).
Such a dualistic model of property limits our understanding of the ways in which the
property rights of different claimants are interdependent. This interdependence arises not only
from legal institutions that mediate property rights, but also from social institutions that
determine and distribute rights, and how these legal and social institutions interface. The three-tiered
model presented in this paper--ideological, legal, and social--reveals the systemic nature of
property rights. Issues concerning 'new' forms of intellectual property, as well as the management
of natural resources, highlight the limitations of the ideological approach to property rights,
which largely ignores the legal and social relationships embedded in these forms of property.
This paper explores the implications of such voracious property for biodiversity.