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| Rethinking Intellectual Property |
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Intellectual Property and the Morality Pretence
Western political institutions have nevertheless canonised these rights with the stamp of morality.
The US is currently the most vigorous upholder of these 'moral rights' and, perhaps not coincidentally, the 'moral rights' covered by copyright were estimated to have contributed $791.2 billion to the US economy in 2001.viii Computer software 'piracy' in China during the 1990s for example has triggered a much sterner reaction from the United States than has widespread human rights violations.ix It took the invention of the 'war on terror' to provide the US with a challenger to its erstwhile anti-piracy 'moral focus.' Not to be outdone though by the victims of the September 11th Attacks on the World Trade Centre, Michael Greene then president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, warned of a worldwide threat, "…pervasive, out of control, and oh so criminal." He exhorted his Grammy ceremony audience to, "embrace this life and death issue", and he wasn't referring to al-Qaida!
Since the end of the nineteenth century 'intellectual property' rights have increasingly gained protection on an international scale. First came the Paris Convention of 1883 on patents and other industrial property, and then the Berne Convention of 1886 for literary and artistic works. These treaties resulted in equal treatment of patent and copyright holders at a national level along with harmonization of procedures across countries. The Paris and Berne Conventions did not, however, make any provisions for enforcement. The world Intellectual Property organization (WIPO) now coordinates the working of Intellectual Property Offices (IPOs) of member states but has only weak enforcement powers. The latest and most far reaching agreement, administered by the World Trade Organisation (WTO), is the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). It has stronger enforcement powers because the World Trade Organization, which can seriously damage the health of any third world economy, arbitrates disputes. These powers gained deadly clarity when applied to the 25.3 million people expected to die of AIDS in Southern Africa.x Fortunately for them, Brazil, India and Argentina were able to provide cheap anti-retroviral drugs much to the vocal dismay of US, British and Swiss pharmaceutical companies. Threats from the US trade corps, led by the then Vice-President Al Gore put a stop to this during the Clinton administration, which briefly taxed some South African imports to the US by way of retaliation followed by a much publicised offer of billions of dollars of aid. In reality these loans were to be paid back at commercial interest rates and on condition that the drugs were purchased from US companies at full cost. The main supplier of cheap alternatives, Argentina, soon backed down after US threats.xi
The odd thing about America's enthusiasm for international enforcement is that it was itself once a major 'pirate' of foreign copyrighted or patented materials right up until the middle of the nineteenth century.xii The famous British author Charles Dickens found the American government completely uninterested in the, "pleas of foreign authors that American publishers were reprinting their works without permission."xiii It wasn't until 1989 that the US found it worthwhile to sign up to the Berne Convention. Why was the U.S. 103 years late to assert this particular incarnation of the 'moral right'? In the 1950s the U.S. had been lobbying for the Universal Copyright Convention, which did not have such stringent requirements for harmonized protection, procedures and length of protection but by 1989: "the U.S. had become a major exporter of copyrighted works, and wanted both protection abroad and a voice in the international policy making process".xiv More recently the U.S. has been a leader in terms of harmonization, aligned with her commercial interests, first in it's own neighbourhood with The North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) and then with TRIPS.
Morality and Economics
Morality seems to be subservient to the dictates of economic growth in a capitalist system. New ideas lie at the heart of today's knowledge economy and economic growth is the only heart capitalism will ever have. Nigel Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequer throughout much of the reign of British PM Margaret Thatcher, wrote, "It is the moral dimension that lies at the heart of the matter. For man is a moral animal, and no political or economic order can long survive except on a moral base … (Yet) the apologists of capitalism have hoped to win the day on the merits of its fruits."xv
Continued economic growth is therefore the concern of those who hope that capitalism can survive the future. John Maynard Keynes had earlier presented a bleak argument for the future of capitalism in his 1930 essay 'Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren'-a future in which the massive economic growth that has characterized the industrialized countries would run out of steam, thanks to the 'Law of Diminishing Returns' whereby adding any additional factor of production gives less of an increase than the previous one. The prediction was that after some two centuries of growth, unparalleled in human history, the capitalist bubble would burst forever and be replaced by some more stable form of society.
Seventy four years later the bubble has still not burst on the grandchildren of the 1930s, and post war economists such as Joseph Schumpeter, Robert Solow, Keneth Arrow and Joseph Stiglitz have sought to explain this unexpected reprieve from the ravages of the law of diminishing returns. They theorised that it was the ongoing pace of technological change that was sustaining growth. But there was still a problem, because new technologies are themselves limited and subject to the law of diminishing returns like any other tangible factors of production.
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