WIKIUser:LRathborn
ORG Quotebin
What this page is
This is the ORG quotebin. It exists to provide useful quotes by experts in ORG's fields of interest. These could be inserted into correspondence, articles and so on. Quotes are referenced and organised by topic and then by author.
What this page is not
A repository for comments that have not been previously published, or a space for commenting on the quotes themselves. Please keep it to just the quotes.
Patents as investment guarantee
"For corporations the patent system had really to function more as a public guarantee of returns on private investment than as an opportunity to make returns. The stronger the patent monopoly the more certainty there would be for these players. Whether or not stronger patents resulted in more innovation was another question. The main function of the patent system had to be investment guarantee." (Drahos, 2002)
Patents as protectionism
"States realized that patent systems could be used to cloak protectionist strategies. There were also reputational advantages for states to be seen to be sticking to intellectual property systems. One could attend the various revisions of the Paris and Berne conventions, participate in the cosmopolitan moral dialogue about the need to protect the fruits of authorial labor and inventive genius...knowing all the while that one's domestic intellectual property system was a handy protectionist weapon." (Ibid.)
TRIPS
"It was an accepted part of international commercial morality that states would design domestic intellectual property law to suit their own economic circumstances. States made sure that existing international intellectual property agreements gave them plenty of latitude to do so." (Ibid.)
Property rights and freedom
"Property rights confer authority over resources. When authority is granted to the few over resources on which many depend, the few gain power over the goals of the many. This has consequences for both political and economic freedoms with in a society." (Ibid.)
Selected Literature Summary Section
What this page is
This page provides a summary of some of the relevant literature concerning ORG's areas of interest, organised by author and book title, and crosslinked to the rest of the ORG wiki (including quotebin) and Wikipedia where necessary. If you find a book or other resource that you think would help ORG's goals, please summarise it here or link to another summary (but no Amazon reviews, please)
What this page is not
A discussion page, a page for bashing people who do not agree with ORG's point of view or a review page.
Issue Pages
The following issue pages are meant to give the reader a general overview of a particular subject. The content of these pages is weighted; typically, it would not pass Wikipedia's "neutral point of view" criterion, hence its presence on ORG's wiki. Please edit these pages if you can find supporting sources, or rewrite if the landscape changes.
Berne Convention
The Berne Convention on Copyright, signed in 1886, is an international agreement on copyright covering 186 countries.
TRIPS
Stands for Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights.
Patent Regimes
A collection of patent and intellectual property law that encapsulates the sum of the protection available to patent owners. Also used in a derogatory sense to describe the "barriers to entry" nature of the patent system. Historically, patents as market protectionism were used as leverage in absolute monopolies centered around certain goods such as wine, coal and soap. Price-fixing behaviour is also protected.
Intellectual Property
Tangent with Patent Regime. Intellectual Property can refer to a wall of patents and copyrights held by organisations and companies as part of a portfolio of ideas and concepts that traditionally serve at least two purposes. The first is to safeguard the commercial exploitation of a marketable idea or process; the second is to create barriers to entry for new goods creators who might offer unwanted competition. Privatisation of a public good (E.g, creating a marketable medicine out of indigenous ingredients and methods) is also one of the possible end results of the IP process.
Peter Drahos has written extensively on IP rights; his 2002 book 'Information Feudalism' contains a dissection of the current state of the restrictions posed by IP on the information economy by rights holders as well as an analysis of the genesis of the current global IP system, which he characterises as creating a closed-shop environment geared towards the protection of corporate profits at the expense of knowledge as a public common good. He makes a particular example of patents and IP surrounding the biotechnology sector; as an example, knowledge which would seem to be in the public domain, such as gene sequences, is patented on the basis of a particular technique of its manufacture or make-up. Knowledge is then internalised to the patent-holder with penalties for any infringers, unless the patent-holder decides to license the technology or sequence, thus blocking future research that the patent-holder may have no intention of doing.
Drahos also makes the point that the IP cartels formed by private companies depend increasingly on sponsored public sector research, for example in universities. Under a standard model, the research team gets its name on the scientific paper; the sponsor gets the rights to the far more valuable patent relating to the research. Drahos explains: "...companies have been anxious to forge links with universities because for all their private R&D dollars they are profoundly dependent on public science in all fields of technology. In biotechnology the dependence is striking; for example more than 70% of scientific papers cited in biotechnology patents originated in solely public science institutions compared with 16.5% that originated in the private sector" (Drahos, 2002). As a result, "Patents, instead of being a reward for inventors who place private information into the public domain, have become a means of recycling public information as private monopolies" (Ibid.)
Corporations involved in constructing IP regimes
Pfizer
Founder member of the Intellectual Property Committee in 1986. The IPC was "dedicated to the negotiation of a comprehensive agreement on intellectual property in the current GATT round of multilateral trade negotiations" (Drahos, 2002, p118). In the summer of that year, IPC sent several trade delegations to involved nations and pressured companies and corporations overseas (mostly Japan and the EU) to lobby their governments to include IP on the trade agenda for the Punta del Este round of GATT. The thinking in the medium term was to present to nations a model GATT IP agreement authored and agreed by the world's major corporations.
Also involved: DuPont, General Electric, General Motors, HP, IBM, Monsanto, Johnson and Johnson, Rockwell, Warner.
Monsanto
Agribusiness hyperglomerate (see Wikipedia page). Producer of GM crops and seed stock. TRIPS Advocate. Accused of numerous rights violations, some cases upheld. Instrumental in the field of DNA and gene-related patents, holds substantial amounts of patents relating to GM crops and genes. Target of numerous anti-cartel lawsuits along with co-conspirators Dow Chemical and and DuPont.
Authors on IP who may be of interest to ORG supporters: Tim Wu, Peter Drahos, John Braithwaite, Tartelon Gillespie, Robert Burnell.