Opening Pandora's box : Exploring flexibilities and alternatives for protecting traditional knowledge and genetic resources under the intellectual property framework

What happens when resources get valuable and scarce? How is Intellectual Property dealing with market failures related to sub-patentable innovation or purely traditional knowledge with interesting applications? The protection of traditional knowledge and genetic resources (TKGR) has been one of the major modern challenges in international IP law. The entry into force of the Convention on Biological Diversity and its implementation in national legislation has created more questions than the ones it answered. This dissertation evaluates proposed remedies to the TKGR market failure and implementation initiatives by using Coase’s Theorem and Rawls’ theory of justice. Apart from presenting and elaborating on alternative forms of entitlement, the dissertation supports a thorough procedure in the introduction of a new entitlement for TKGR, that could also be used in other situations where complicated market failures are in seek of a remedy inside or at the periphery of the IP system.