In Defense of Intellectual Property Anxiety: A Response to Professor Fagundes

Aaron K. Perzanowski, UC Berkeley School of Law

Abstract

In this Response to Professor Fagundes’s Property Rhetoric and the Public Domain, Professor Perzanowski expresses skepticism about two assumptions underlying the argument for embracing property rhetoric to promote the public domain. This argument assumes, first, public recognition of social discourse theory as an account of property and, second, rhetorical advantages of social discourse theory that are comparable to those of more familiar notions of private property. Perzanowski concludes that the simple intuitive appeal of Blackstonian property cautions against styling the struggle for balanced copyright and patent policy as a debate over competing property interests.