The book is an inquiry into the nature and scope of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) using three different approaches: the philosophical, the empirical, and the theoretical. It studies the different justifications usually put forward in favour of protecting rights in intellectual property and shows how such rights come into conflict with other rights in society. The author contends that rights can and should be 'structured in a lexical order of priority whererights which are linked to survival strategies ought to be to have enough legal teeth to trump rights which are more in the nature of economic entitlements, like IPRs are'.