Intellectual Property and the Good Society
Intellectual Property and the Good Society
Those thoughtful fellows at ArsTechnica offer a thoughtful essay on intellectual property.
Since Ars Technica started in the summer of ’98, I’ve seen a steady increase in the amount of reporting that I do on intellectual property-related issues. This trend isn’t due to a change in my tastes in reporting the news so much as it is to a marked increase in the visibility of intellectual property (IP) as a significant factor in the shaping of the technological and cultural landscape. IP has always been there, a mostly neglected, esoteric corner of the legal system that has functioned largely out of sight of the majority of consumers. But as of the past few years, the sheer volume of patent, trademark and copyright disputes seems to have increased exponentially. Even more significantly, these disputes are having a greater impact on everyday folks, from Quake mod authors to music fans to farmers. The current situation has caught many of us off guard, provoking confusion as to the nature and/or reality of an IP-based threat to our civic freedoms.
The essay goes on to describe three methods by which corporations are seeking to protect and tightly control intellectual property. The social justice implications of those methods are then assessed.
Should those behind the WIPO get their way, the social justice implications of the above, three-part structure could be most severe. I’ll give just a few examples of the effects of the legislative prong of this plan; many more could be adduced. Consider, for instance, the American pharmaceutical industry’s efforts to block an Indian company’s sale of low-cost, generic AIDS drugs to Uganda–a country with an infection rate in the double digits. Besides the obvious fact that millions of lives are being placed at risk to protect the “intellectual property rights” of a few Western companies, this incident directly impacts the cause of Third World economic justice in that it directly affects India’s ability to clone drugs and develop its own, nascent pharmaceutical industry.
The rights of poverty-stricken countries to use genetically modified (GM) crops is also at issue, as seed makers like Monsanto aggressively prosecute farmers who reuse seeds containing Monsanto’s “intellectual property.” Thus, technology that could be used to combat malnutrition is turned into a tool of extortion by Western “rightsholders” with armies of lawyers and international treaties at their backs. Third World countries face similar problems when trying to develop nascent hardware or software industries, because the West holds patents on software, hardware, and business processes that start-ups in less developed nations must license if they want to use. The restrictions and fees placed on these fragile industries by Western rightsholders greatly constrain these countries’ ability to develop industries of their own.
There are similar problems with the other two prongs. For instance, the technical prong eliminates fair use on the consumer’s end and disenfranchises some would-be content producers because the costs of being compliant (i.e. licensing approved file formats, encryption mechanisms, etc.) may be too high. The cross-licensing prong has a similar effect in that would-be content producers may not have enough capital to buy themselves into the heavily internetworked and cross-licensed content production and distribution game. These and other problems have been described extensively elsewhere, so I won’t comment on them further.
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