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| Rethinking Intellectual Property |
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Knowledge Based Economic Growth Without Monopoly
The huge success of the Linux operating system, upon which millions of business users depend because it is more stable than Microsoft's inflated offerings, was built upon foundations established by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and Richard Stallman of MIT in 1984. They did something which in the machine world view of many capitalist economists would be called irrational behaviour - they developed software and published the source code for it absolutely free of charge and open for the world to access and build upon. And build upon it people did - in droves, making it a growing threat to Microsoft which is currently doing its monopolistic best to crush the growth of Linux. Indeed the World Wide Web that made the revolutionary free flow of information possible in the first place was designed and given to the world for free by Tim Berners-Lee. While a software engineer at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, he developed a programme in 1980 that allowed files on his computer to be linked to each other by a 'hypertext' protocol. He then extended the idea to allow users anywhere in the world to 'jump' from computer to computer sharing files with the ease of a telephone call by developing HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language) and a set of rules for communication called HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol). For this contribution of inestimable value to the world he was recently honoured in the Queen's New years Honours list. When asked what were the most important milestones in the Web's development he began his reply, "One crucial step was, after 18 months of asking, CERN's signing of a document renouncing the rights to charge royalties for the technology…"xxii He has worked tirelessly at the head of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) to constantly update standards and prevent any company from monopolizing the web. By championing free open access standards for the webxxiii he is the antithesis of 'intellectual property' devotees who have embarked upon a programme of total ownership ranging from patents on toast to continuing attempts to secure patents on the genes in our own bodies.
One thing is sure. Human creativity will flourish if set free from the restraint of greedy dinosaurs that want to grow fatter sitting alone on mountains of gold.
From Renaissance to Industrial Revolution
Proponents of monopoly rights quote historical precedents to add legitimacy to their arguments such as the granting of the first patent in England by King Henry VI, which was the beginning of a long tradition of the English crown granting 'letters patent' to favoured persons. This was the year 1449, a turbulent year during the 'hundred years war' when the French were besieging English forces in Normandy - and just 2 years before the birth of Christopher Columbus, and 3 years before the birth of the man who epitomised the renaissance - Leonardo da Vinci. The great thinkers adventurers and artists of the renaissance period established completely new ways of thinking about the world without the so-called protection of intellectual property rights. Kepler was working out the orbit of Mars. Galileo was studying the craters on the moon and coming to the conclusion, that he was later to publish and then abjure before the Church on pain of death in 1633, that the moon was actually controlling the ebb and flow of the tides on earth. As this explosion of heroic thinking and creativity, often at great personal risk to the innovators, was taking place the granting of patents had led to such grubby and restrictive monopoly practices that the whole process of granting patents was abolished, only to be reopened a few short years later in 1623 under the more restrictive conditions that we are familiar with today. The statute of Monopolies act 1623 restricted the scope of these patents to, "projects of new invention". The first United States patent legislation to be enacted was the Patent Act of 1740. The Statute of Anne 1709/1710 marked the beginning of statutory copyright in the UK.
By the time that the revolutionary expansion of renaissance creativity had reached a more moderate level monopoly rights were well enshrined in law just in time for the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution is often credited to the enhancement of the Newcomen steam engine by James Watt in 1768. The hollowness of a revolution built on new machines rather than new ideas was not to sink in until men started to kill each other using these machines. As for Watt, thanks to the idea of monopoly rights being in place at this time, he was able to divert most of his creative abilities into lobbying parliament for a series of patents, which prevented other innovators from mass producing improvements to his design for another 20 years. In 1781 Jonathan Hornblower began production of a superior, and in fact independently designed, machine but was forced out of business by Watt who brought the full force of the law against Hornblower leaving him ruined and in jail while Watt died a rich man. New innovation was thereby strangled till the expiry of the patents in 1800 and the industrial revolution was in fact stalled for a generation.xxiv
A 'New Kind of Dark Ages'
Seth Shulman, writing in the MIT Technological Review argued that in some scientific fields "warring fiefdoms guarding their knowledge" would lead to a "new kind of dark ages"! Those words ring true for me personally because I have experienced something of this over my 8 years of post-doctoral research experience in the field of molecular biology. It seems that I am not alone. A review of geneticists in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that secrecy and hoarding of information linked to the desire to patent was widespread and causing harm to science.xxv One of the survey respondents, Nelson Kiang, professor emeritus of physiology at MIT wrote "…our common enemy is ignorance, and we should be helping each other as fast as possible."
The WIPO, which is actively spreading the gospel of intellectual property, fancifully employs Einstein, posthumously, as a supporter for its cause asserting, "Einstein understood that it is the ability to stand on an existing foundation of accepted knowledge, and see beyond to the next frontier of discovery." This is a reference to Newton's famous often repeated statement, "If I have seen further than other men, it is because I have stood upon the shoulders of giants".xxvi My question is: would Einstein have stood on the shoulders of giants if those giants were using monopoly rights to put their hands tightly around his throat?
Two sets of authors have recently discussed the issue in a Canadian Research Journal making reference to a declaration in June 2001 by a U.S. company called Myriad that hospitals in several Canadian provinces were violating its patents on a test for genetic susceptibility to breast cancer. Myriad demanded that all tests must be carried out only in its own lab at a cost of US$2500, almost 5 times what was previously being charged.
People are dying because of ignorance and being forced to pay extortionate sums of money for treatment and diagnosis! That is tragic, because there are tens of thousands of biologists who have been working for decades in order to get to the bottom of the causes and treatment of cancer and other disease only to have the benefits of their research, mostly financed by government or charitable sources, held back from the people who need them. It is also odd that financial advantage from monopoly rights are meant to motivate scientists while the vast majority of them work for a lower salary than that given to train drivers on the London underground and have been coerced to sign waivers in their contracts assigning all rights from their inventions to the universities or institutes that employ them anyway. On the other hand, one studyxxvii showed that the number of intellectual property lawyers employed per dollar spent on research and development increased 70% between 1986 and 1994.
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