Ikechi Mgbeoji is an Associate Professor of Law at Osgoode Hall Law School and a member of IP Osgoode.

For more than one hundred years, the branch of law known as intellectual property rights (IPRs) has been treated by universities and colleges in the Third World as an after-thought, an appendage to other disciplines of law. This note is not concerned with the different theories of varying degrees of coherence and persuasiveness adduced by scholars and jurists in justification for the existence of IPRs. Rather, I seek to draw attention to the clerical drudgery which largely passes for intellectual property rights legal practice in the Third World. By the Third World, I mean the post-colonial states of Africa with the exception of South Africa.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Feature Post, Innovation, IP, Patent Practice, Patents
Comment: 1

Ikechi Mgbeoji is an Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School.

An interesting phenomenon in civilised circles these days is the wonderful ability of both the popular and academic commentariat to reduce or at least purport to reduce complex issues to convenient and potable sound-bites. Perhaps, the benevolence of “experts” in sparing members of the public the excruciating details and nuances of difficult issues is a reflection of the “fast-food” age in which we live. In the age of super-sized McDonalds burgers and “take-away” nuggets of wisdom reduced to neatly packed shiny boxes of chloroform, there is little patience with nuance and complexity. The attitude seems to be that if you are not for us, you must be against us. Few issues better exemplify this scary phenomenon than the much repeated demise of what has been condescendingly described as the “old economy” and its replacement by a shiny, wondrous world of a “knowledge economy.”

In theory, the knowledge economy refers to an economy focused on the production and management of knowledge within the confines of economic rationality. On a second level, the knowledge economy refers to the use of knowledge technologies such as information technology [IT] and information management [IM] to produce economic benefits. On the other side of the divide, the ancien regime, is the old economy: that clanging world of manufacturing, labour, and industry. Although the exuberance of the false obituary of the old economy has been tempered by the realization that there never was a “Berlin Wall” separating the old economy from the knowledge economy, the fervent voices of the ideological holdouts who wait on the advent of the knowledge economy compels a reappraisal of what really happened in the past two decades.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Innovation, IP
Comment: 1