Organizational Innovations: The Intersection of Constitutional Rights and Economics of Intellectual Property Law

It is a permanent question whether the traditional copyright law should recognize novelties and research activities and protect them as individual rights along with organizational achievements as intellectual property. As suggested by some scholars, conventional wisdom holds that patents contribute to progress. However, both current IPR systems including powerful ones such as USA’s, and international agreements overlooked two constitutionally recognized rights. The first is the huge bulk of research and production efforts by human resources and their creative ideas behind these, and the second is the common idea of consumers’ welfare around the world. As a result, one unsettled point is how personal works and achievements, practically produced within organizational research programs or by individual innovations can be legitimate sources of only exclusive rights of those organizations. We pose the question whether personal research and working innovations a person makes, while he is bond with organizational obligations should be organization’s assets or are they under his personal patent rights? Patents normally protect research products in scientific areas entailing huge investments such as HIV drugs, agricultural products, pharmaceutics and informational items as they are intellectual property that belong to corresponding operating bodies. Organizations today depend heavily on personal innovations of their human resources to develop new products and technologies. We, referring to some IP research and legal models, suggest that the ideas and innovative thoughts behind these copy righted products are subsidiary in relation to human resources. Conventional IP law has not yet come to the stand that local and global policies should take into account a kind of differentiation between these two factors as organizational assets.