Timothy Chan (National University of Singapore Faculty of Law) has posted Intangibles in Singapore: The Illusion of “Property in a Generic Sense” on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Like elsewhere in the Commonwealth legal world, the rise of digital assets has thrown a spanner into the works of traditional property law in Singapore. The question of how property law applies to such intangible “things” necessitates a re-examination of the conceptual and doctrinal structure of property that is so often taken for granted in the context of tangibles. This chapter will focus on one particular trend in the nascent Singapore jurisprudence on intangible property, which is the seductive tendency to think that there is such a thing as “property in a generic sense”. Behind this notion is an assumption that there is a single notion of “property” that applies across various common law domains, including the property torts, interim proprietary relief, trusts law, and title transfers. This trend is far from unique to the Singapore context; as will be shown, similar assumptions are implicit in the frequent invocations of the Ainsworth test across the Commonwealth. But the assumption is flawed. In fact, there are at least three different concepts of property that must be kept distinct, which I call property as “things”, property as “patrimony”, and property as “persistence”. The importance of keeping these concepts distinct will be illustrated using the context of the misappropriation of intangible property, drawing on recent decisions from England and Singapore.
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Readers interested in this paper may also be interested in a new Lexicon entry: Legal Theory Lexicon 113: Property Theory.
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