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In an opening vignette to an otherwise insightful article, Carol M. Rose (2003) comparespeople who hold intellectual property rights to poor villagers in India. They put effort and timeinto developing small but productive properties, only to have the wild tiger or rogue elephant ofthe public domain trample them or eat them up. In extreme cases, IP "villages" are abandonedand left to "the jungle" of public property. But Rose neglects another part of the story, and that isthat the villagers are also hungry, and while they do not directly consume tigers, they do consumethe environment a tiger needs to survive. This paper argues, from the perspective of legalpluralism, that both private and public properties are voracious. In recent western developments,they each expand by trying to 'eating the other up'. Western property theory promotes thisdualistic game of voracious property types. In exporting this game world wide throughprivatization, international agreements and regulations many other more balanced approaches toproperty, which fall between the public/private divide, are being consumed as well (as in kingroup corporate property, cultural property etc.).Such a dualistic model of property limits our understanding of the ways in which theproperty rights of different claimants are interdependent. This interdependence arises not onlyfrom legal institutions that mediate property rights, but also from social institutions thatdetermine and distribute rights, and how these legal and social institutions interface. The three-tieredmodel presented in this paper--ideological, legal, and social--reveals the systemic nature ofproperty rights. Issues concerning 'new' forms of intellectual property, as well as the managementof natural resources, highlight the limitations of the ideological approach to property rights,which largely ignores the legal and social relationships embedded in these forms of property.This paper explores the implications of such voracious property for biodiversity.
