FAirness, Morality and Equality in international and European Intellectual Property Law (FAME-IP)

FAME-IP is a project exploring the emerging concept of fairness, morality and equality at the interface of international and European intellectual property (IP) law, with particular regard to new business opportunities created by disruptive innovation. Fairness, morality and equality form fundamental values of a civil society that law promotes and protects. Facing various challenges of global governance, safeguarding these fundamental values in the social institutions is becoming more important than ever.

As IPRs are not ends in themselves, they should serve fundamentals values. Understanding the fine-grained mechanics of the interaction among fundamental values on one hand and the doctrinal concepts in the law on the other, is crucial in times when digital innovation of disruptive nature presents new opportunities and challenges to society. New technological developments such as digitalisation and artificial intelligence (AIs) constantly question the value neutrality of IPR, demanding norm changes. Despite this, value based discussion has been removed almost entirely from the main stream discourse on IP law and policy. Balancing protection and promotion of sound business practices and fair competition has become the rhetorical battle cry for law reforms, but the concrete changes in the IP law in response to these technologies are done without much heed to, or guidance from the fundamental values based considerations. This is in part due to incomplete internalisation of the values in IP law as well as methodological limitation. As a result, not only law suffers from uncertainty of under and over protection caused by fragmentation and overlaps, but resulting reform proposals create the illusion that value neutral technical adjustments to IP law may be made routinely to regulate unforeseen valuable behaviours. FAME-IP aims to bring the discussion of values - fairness. morality and equality - back into the centre of IP system reform discourse, by exploring how these values are internalised within European and international IP law and analysing to what extent external normative arguments - politicised, economised and constitutionalised,- can be used in IP system reform.