Primal intellectual property rights: Re‐envisioning modern paradigms through a protodesmic perspective

Abstract Intellectual property (IP) is frequently approached through its codified forms and formal institutions, with less attention to the deeper social foundations from which protection of intangible creations arose. This study considers an earlier layer of such protection, termed primal IP rights, formed among communities that safeguarded creative works through custom, oral tradition, and social regard before the advent of codified law. These practices are treated as functional antecedents of modern IP and not as its historical ancestors. Adopting legal pluralism as its framework, it regards the customary orders that upheld them as normative fields in their own right, holding authority that did not depend on statute or judicial remedy. Historical, cross‐cultural, and theoretical materials are drawn together, with instances from societies such as the Nootka, Koryak, and Kai, and with counterexamples, among them imperial China, accorded due weight. A protodesmic account of IP is advanced, tracing protection to the bond between a maker and a creation honoured by the surrounding community, from which the market rationale later developed. Situated within the theory of internally limited rights, this view suggests that the reach of IP may be gauged by the balance it preserves and not by the breadth of exclusivity it confers. Contemporary protection of traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions is understood to rest on this footing, marking a return to the earliest form of protection and a basis for more balanced, human‐oriented frameworks.