DEFINING THE WORLD’S PUBLIC PROPERTY
Le Monde Diplomatique
A global public good
Who does knowledge belong to?
Le Monde Diplomatique
A global public good
Who does knowledge belong to?
When intellectual property increases the price of vital drugs ten fold, sentencing millions of sick Africans to death, this is not just a hypothetical question. The future of the world economy and of part of humanity now hangs on the answer. Computing, agro-industry, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and communications lead the way in the "information revolution". The rise of these activities has brought with it an ever greater need for a check to be kept on new inventions. If such a virtual product as knowledge, which is by nature copiable, is to be turned to profit, its dissemination must be controlled and an artificial scarcity created that allows a price to be set. Such is the primary objective of intellectual property law, together with a concern to protect the "moral" rights of authors over the future of their works (literary and artistic property), to protect the consumer (trade marks) or to limit recourse to industrial secrecy by publishing the detail of inventions (patents).
In an attempt to keep pace with these developments, following the trend in the United States the World Trade Organisation and the World Intellectual Property Organisation have launched themselves into a frenzy of legal activity to "strengthen" the rights of owners in order to ensure they get a return on their investment and thereby, in theory, stimulate world growth.
But a number of factors stand in the way of this. First, as the United Nations Development Programme points out, many of today’s developed nations which are so keen to see intellectual property rights strengthened had very vague rules when their own national industries were being built. They only changed their tune when they became exporters of technology. By amassing intellectual property rights over the whole of knowledge (from photographic archives to the human genome, from software to drugs), the richest countries, which are also the ones with the most highly developed legal systems (the US employs one third of the world’s lawyers) are making sure they have control over vast swathes of future output.
Secondly, the appropriation of knowledge by private firms is not always legitimate. Both technological research and cultural production feed primarily on knowledge shared by the whole of society. But there are for the most part no mechanisms for promoting and defending the public domain of knowledge, little thought having been given to what might be called "global public goods" (1).
Current thinking about the ownership of this common wealth of humanity is embryonic. The American lawyer James Boyle compares it to 1950s thinking on the environment: a few commentators are sounding the alarm about particular issues but are not yet in a position to make a connection between them (2). But the matter needs to be discussed urgently if we are to put a stop to the sequestration of knowledge by private interests (see articles by Philippe Quéau and Martine Bulard).
Ph. R.
(1) Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, Marc A. Stern (ed.), Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, UNDP - Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1999.
(2) James Boyle, "A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the Net?", http://www.wcl.american.edu/pub/faculty/boyle/
In an attempt to keep pace with these developments, following the trend in the United States the World Trade Organisation and the World Intellectual Property Organisation have launched themselves into a frenzy of legal activity to "strengthen" the rights of owners in order to ensure they get a return on their investment and thereby, in theory, stimulate world growth.
But a number of factors stand in the way of this. First, as the United Nations Development Programme points out, many of today’s developed nations which are so keen to see intellectual property rights strengthened had very vague rules when their own national industries were being built. They only changed their tune when they became exporters of technology. By amassing intellectual property rights over the whole of knowledge (from photographic archives to the human genome, from software to drugs), the richest countries, which are also the ones with the most highly developed legal systems (the US employs one third of the world’s lawyers) are making sure they have control over vast swathes of future output.
Secondly, the appropriation of knowledge by private firms is not always legitimate. Both technological research and cultural production feed primarily on knowledge shared by the whole of society. But there are for the most part no mechanisms for promoting and defending the public domain of knowledge, little thought having been given to what might be called "global public goods" (1).
Current thinking about the ownership of this common wealth of humanity is embryonic. The American lawyer James Boyle compares it to 1950s thinking on the environment: a few commentators are sounding the alarm about particular issues but are not yet in a position to make a connection between them (2). But the matter needs to be discussed urgently if we are to put a stop to the sequestration of knowledge by private interests (see articles by Philippe Quéau and Martine Bulard).
Ph. R.
(1) Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, Marc A. Stern (ed.), Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, UNDP - Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1999.
(2) James Boyle, "A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the Net?", http://www.wcl.american.edu/pub/faculty/boyle/
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