TRIPs and indigenous knowledge…
Fresh on the heels of last weeks piece which focussed upon the contentiousness of including environmental and labour standards within trade negotiations, I have been thinking about another big controversy within the world trade arena – intellectual property… and more precisely, trade related intellectual property rights (or TRIPS)… The idea is that people aren’t going to feel too inspired to create and invent new things such as cancer cures, and I-phones if their ideas can be stolen once they have formulated them… makes sense I guess… Here is our friend Obama remarking on intellectual property rights at the export-import bank’s annual conference last year,
“we’re going to aggressively protect our intellectual property. Our single greatest asset is the innovation and the ingenuity and creativity of the American people… But it’s only a competitive advantage if our companies know that someone else can’t just steal that idea and duplicate it with cheaper inputs and labor. There’s nothing wrong with other people using our technologies… we just want to make sure that it’s licensed and that American businesses are getting paid appropriately.”
Sounds a fairly noble cause to me! After all, if I spend ten years inventing something I want to be rewarded for my investment and my work, without intellectual property rights this can’t happen so easily… But what happens when US producers, like Monsanto, start claiming seeds as their intellectual property? Or when scientists patent Indian spices as their intellectual property (for more see here) This process is known as Bio-Piracy… and is understandably annoying a lot of emerging and less developed nations, in particular India who are outraged by such commercialisation of indigenous knowledge…
Is it right that something which is genetically modified can be patented by a corporation? A seed for example… Is it right that a US company can be granted a patent for an Indian spice simply because nobody has claimed it at the patent office yet? How about pharmaceutical companies who make amazing cancer and aids drugs but don’t give them to people in need, and won’t let anyone create a cheaper version because they have to protect their profits…
I understand completely that the expense is in researching and testing to find the medicine and once that is done the process is very cheap, so in order to recoup their investments on research and development these companies want to be protected… but including such protection in trade negotiations makes the issue quiet contentious… For example – Say I am in charge of India, (I like this game! :)) a country with a high number of deaths from HIV (some 310,000 annually), I know there is a revolutionary drug which will help to stall the number of people suffering and dying from this illness… but the patent for its production is held by a US pharmaceutical giant eager to protect its profits… (more on that here) and so many can’t afford the drugs which they so desperately need. Once TRIPs are built into trade negotiations I have a choice… I either import a load of black market, generic HIV drugs and face hefty sanctions from the World Trade Organisation, or I let my people die! Either way the development of my nation is constrained and even stunted… 
Meanwhile, Monsanto and their friends are rooting all around India, and the broader world, stealing their indigenous knowledge, calling it their own because no record exists (in English) of it being their indigenous knowledge!
All TRIPs appear to be doing is causing a negative distribution of wealth effect by moving money away from people in developing countries to patent and copyright owners in developed countries. And imposing an artificial scarcity on the citizens of countries that would otherwise have had weaker intellectual property laws… Obama preaches the virtues of fostering innovation through such mechanisms but shows little concern for its abuses by US companies abroad… the hypocrisy of our democracy is highlighted once again… all the rhetoric in the world concerning development and fighting disease goes out the window, in my opinion, when one thinks about TRIPs for too long…
to find out about seed activism check here, and here… for an interesting article on the political economy of intellectual property click here… Remember to Like, Share, Comment … get involved !!
BETWEEN HEGEMONY AND CHANGE 
“he idea is that people aren’t going to feel too inspired to create and invent new things such as cancer cures, and I-phones if their ideas can be stolen once they have formulated them… makes sense I guess”
Does it really? I agree that some sort of protection is in order (that is: if wanted by the inventor) but I do not think that the reason these people are spending so much time inventing stuff is because they get paid for it. It is what they like or think is important to do. And often, they continue to do so once they are rich. Actually if they only did it for the money, it would be good policy to make sure they dont get too rich :-p
Hmm… so the guys at Pfizer enjoy making erection pills? Or the guys at Merck with their anti-baldness pills think its an important thing to do? Military technology etc…. For sure some people have a natural flair and need to invent things… It is the offer of protection of their ideas which makes the profession so potentially lucrative and therefore provides an incentive for them to invest time and effort into R&D…
Plus the passage doesn’t say they ONLY do it for money…. it says it makes sense for them to want their ideas to be protected, so people don’t Free-ride and make money off the back of their research…For sure people enjoy researching and inventing but without the protection in place a lot of firms and institutes would be unwilling to make the investment.
I think that the fact that someone continues to do something once they are rich doesn’t mean they must derive happiness from it or a sense that what they are doing is important… They might just not know how to do anything else… they might feel they aren’t rich enough…or old enough to retire…They might not enjoy being at home with the wife and kids so much etc… 🙂
Ok, I need to depart with my basic-comment-think-as-I-write English and try to formulate a decent sentence if I want to make my point clear here.
The problem that I have with your starting point is that it is based too much on an marginalist economist’s perspective (think about the North and XX article from Sam’s course) and their view on how the world is and should look like. Two point are particularly important here: (1) people are motivated by money (they are trigered by incentives), and (2) companies invest only when profits are somewhat certain. As I said in my other comment, this view on people’s motivation is historically incorrect (especially in a pre-capitalist setting) and far from true today. In a sense this question is about motives in general: why do people do what they do? I partly agree with you here (there are many reasons), but I really disagree with your statement about investing companies. This statement of yours does bring out the real issue. My critique here is more about the fundamentals of such a system: if IPRs are only necessary to guarantee profits for companies, than they are disfunctional from the start. For this reason so much money is spend on weapon research anyway! Profits can only be made if the products are sold to people with money (or who take on debt :-p ). Thus IPR’s are always by the rich, for the rich. Right now this goes as far as denying cheap medicines to be sold in Afrika, even though profits cannot be made here anyway! (I realise I sortof reach the same conclusion as you do…)
(btw, there are good things about IPR, such as the consequences of open information for future research. However, this is still within a framework that I cannot support)
This isn’t my forte, so excuse my ignorance.
The stuff about the seeds confuses me. Isn’t TRIPS more focused on the process of achieving a product/service than the product/service itself? Say I whip up a contraption that enables scuba divers breathe underwater for weeks on end, shouldn’t intellectual protection be afforded to the gizmo rather than the air it supplies the scuba diver?
Kingsley read this for more information on GM seeds… http://www.law.northwestern.edu/journals/njtip/v3/n2/4/ Its called “Intellectual Property and Genetically Modified Seeds:The United States, Trade, and the Developing World”
I think the issue is that once the genetics of a seed has been altered then it can be patented and becomes someone’s intellectual property.