The Corner House, a very interesting think tank in the UK, has produced a briefing paper entitled “Who Owns the Knowledge Economy: Political Organising behind TRIPS“. It’s a very enlightening look at the history behind TRIPS, and how a group of corporate elites managed to enforce this intellectual property agenda on all the other countries during the Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations (what allowed the GATT to become the WTO). Here are some notable quotes from the document:
Corporations could also use intellectual property rights and licences to structure, disguise and enforce a global knowledge cartel and to divide international markets among themselves.
Knowledge cartels were not about sharing knowledge, avoiding the duplication of research or achieving efficiencies. They were about privatising knowledge that would grant the holder of that knowledge the power to discipline markets. When the opportunity came to deprive others of their patent rights, it was rarely neglected.
The proliferation of monopolies in Elizabethan England interfered in trade and commerce to such an extent that successive English parliaments worked to eliminate them. In the 19th century, states realised that patent systems could be used to cloak protectionist strategies and thus attacked the patent system on the grounds that its operation was contrary to free trade.
Today, this history of free trade opposition to intellectual property rights has been conveniently elided from debates. Monopoly rights, the exercise of which national parliaments struggled over the centuries to bring under democratic control, have been slipped into a world trade agreement. A TRIPS agreement that would have been rejected in another era as a global charter for monopolists has come to be thought of as consistent with free trade and competition. Indeed, an important rhetorical victory that TRIPS represents is the belief that the absence of intellectual property protection is an impediment to free trade. In the corridors of power that matter to the global economy, the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), bureaucrats now participate in a trade “think speak” in which global monopoly privileges are entirely consistent with free trade.
Underneath the “development” ideology of intellectual property lies an agenda of underdevelopment. It is all about protecting the knowledge and skills of the leaders of the pack. Leaders of the various Northern knowledge-based industries wanted to close the gaps in the patent system when it came to the global control of knowledge, so that they could continue to accrue the power necessary to discipline markets and states. They wanted to change the rules of the knowledge game.
TRIPS pulled off a huge structural shift in the world economy. As the information economy develops, the implications of this for widening inequality in the world system, even within the US and Europe, will become more profound. There will be a digital divide, an access-to-drugs divide, and a divide between those who avoid taxes by shifting their intellectual property rights around the world system and those who simply have to pay them.
[Thanks Barbara]
