Wanted, More than Human Intellectual Property : Animal Authors and Human Machines

This book analyses animal creativity in order to unsettle the dominant assumptions that underpin current ideas of authorship and ownership in intellectual property.

Drawing upon theories of animal behaviour and cognitive ethology, the book exposes and disrupts the anthropocentrism that informs prevailing assumptions about creativity, intentionality, and authorship within the field of intellectual property, towards a new theory of authorship and personhood through play and the playful. Moving on to challenge the invocation of a more general human-nonhuman distinction in this context, the book also engages the challenge to this distinction posed by artificial intelligence. Incorporating critical animal studies, behavioural science, ethology, critical legal studies, and legal philosophy, the book presents a new idea of creativity, which undermines the kind of rivalrous models now common in the field of intellectual property.

This book will be of considerable interest to those studying and teaching in the area of intellectual property, as well as in animal law. It will also appeal to legal theorists and others working in the social sciences in the areas of posthumanism and animal studies.