Alexander Peukert is Professor of civil law, intellectual property, and competition law at Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main/Germany. He has published five books and more than seventy articles in these fields, with a focus on the theoretical foundations of intellectual property law.

1. Introduction; 2. Two ontologies; 3. Two abstractions; 4. Interim summary: an implausible paradigm; 5. The legal explanatory power of the two ontologies; 6. Normative critique of the abstract IP object.