In preparation of People's Health Assembly II - part 20
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This short piece reminds us how and on what lines we have to get
organized towards PHA II to drastically amend TRIPS
Claudio Schuftan
mailto:claudio@hcmc.netnam.vn
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"Who Owns the Knowledge Economy?
Political Organising Behind TRIPS"
by Peter Drahos with John Braithwaite
Corner House Briefing Paper 32
mailto:notification-l@thecornerhouse.org.uk
Ten years ago this year, TRIPS -- the World Trade Organisation's
agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property
Rights -- was signed by more than 100 government ministers.
TRIPS was the most important agreement on intellectual property
of the 20th century. It revolutionised the way that property
rights in information were defined and enforced, and effectively
globalised its intellectual property principles, because most
countries are members of (or are seeking membership of) the
World Trade Organisation.
Yet during the 1980s, almost everyone in the business and trade
community thought TRIPS was a bad idea. It was against the in-
terests of almost everyone except a few software, pharmaceuti-
cal, chemical and entertainment companies in the US and, to a
lesser extent, in Europe and Japan.
It was also a pipe dream. It seemed completely implausible that
an agreement to expand monopoly rights could be put into a re-
gime that was about dismantling trade monopolies and removing
barriers to competition.
So why did more than 100 states that had little to gain by
agreeing to these terms of trade for intellectual property --
terms that offered a few countries so much protection -- sign up
to TRIPS?
Because of a failure of democratic processes, both nationally
and internationally.
This failure enabled a small group of men within the United
States to capture the US trade-agenda-setting process and then,
in partnership with European and Japanese multinationals, to
draft intellectual property principles that became the blueprint
for TRIPS. The resistance of other countries was crushed through
US trade power.
This is the conclusion of Australian researchers Peter Drahos
and John Braithwaite. They interviewed over 500 key informants
because "many of the regulatory standards that have a global
reach in our world are shaped by informal negotiations of which
no written record is made."
Their research, summarised in this latest Corner House briefing
paper, reveals "what the formal language of international intel-
lectual property agreements does not: the informal dynamic of
power that determines the choice of words, their meaning and
subsequent utilization".
TRIPS was possible only because an elite in the US, Japan and
Europe set aside their differences and united around global in-
tellectual property protection. Resisting this new paradigm re-
quires diverse groups and communities to unite in a global poli-
tics that forces governments to design intellectual property
rights to serve the welfare and basic freedoms of citizens.
It also requires understanding the long-term organising strate-
gies of a few business visionaries in order to challenge current
attempts to increase and extend intellectual property rights, to
halt widening inequalities, and to redefine TRIPS as a matter of
injustice.
Corner House Briefing 32: "Who Owns the Knowledge Economy? Po-
litical Organising Behind TRIPS"
by Peter Drahos with John Braithwaite is now on The Corner House
website in html and PDF formats: http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk
Please contact us (mailto:enquiries@thecornerhouse.org.uk) if
you would like to receive a 32-page printed paper copy.
Best regards,
Sarah Sexton/Larry Lohmann/Nicholas Hildyard/Susan Hawley
The Corner House