Management, Governance and Intellectual Property: Electronic Publishing in the UK

Intellectual property issues have been formulated mostly in termsof legal and regulatory aspects. In the case of electronicpublishing, as with a number of other technology-basedindustries, there has been concern on the part of government andinternational bodies to tighten intellectual property rights(IPRs). On the basis of a survey of smaller electronicpublishing firms in the UK, we find that such tightening of IPRshas little support from them. Instead, they voice concern thatintensified regulation, whatever it gains for them in revenues,could alter the whole structure of the industry in ways veryunfavourable to them. The survey reveals that their mainconcerns are, instead, directed at the kind of issues portrayedin the recent literature on ``dynamic capabilities''. In thisliterature, the extent of replicability is central to theprovision of IPRs. We find that policy-makers see electronicpublishing as an instance of `easy replicability', thuswarranting tougher IPRs, whereas the industry itself seesreplicability as considerably harder, because of dependence oninternal capabilities generated within firms. Changes ingovernance need to relate more closely to managementcapabilities. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2000