The Globalization of Intellectual Property Rights: Much Ado About Nothing?
It is hardly surprising that companies try to exploit their intellectual property rights (IPRs) globally. This has generated heated debates about the advantages and disadvantages associated with the global regime of IPRs. The aim of this chapter is to put
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Abstract It is hardly surprising that companies try to exploit their intellectual property rights (IPRs) globally. This has generated heated debates about the advantages and disadvantages associated with the global regime of IPRs. The aim of this chapter is to put the debate in the right context of what IP can actually do, and what they cannot do, in order to reward inventors and innovators and to prevent imitators. The generation, transmission and diffusion of knowledge are complex phenomena and both supporters and detractors of IPRs often tend to exaggerate the effects that IPRs have in the economy and society. We present two ideal-type models for and against IPRs and discuss their limitations. In our view, both models overemphasize the role of IPRs in the world economy. Keywords Innovation • Intellectual Property Rights • Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) • Technological appropriation • Patents • Copyright
D. Archibugi (*) Italian National Research Council, IRPPS, Rome, Italy Birkbeck College, University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] A. Filippetti London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Geography and Environment, London, UK Italian National Research Council, Institute of Regional Studies, Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] M. Mayer et al. (eds.), The Global Politics of Science and Technology - Vol. 1, Global Power Shift, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-55007-2_8, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014
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1 Introduction The international economic landscape is periodically rattled by controversies concerning intellectual property rights. To secure market shares, companies introduce new products and processes and this often leads to controversies for the real or supposed violations of patents, copyrights and trademarks. Very often, the companies involved in these battles are based in different countries. The so-called smart phones war (Filippetti 2012; Graham and Vishnubhakat 2013) has recently captured the attention of public opinion because the product at stake is in the hands of top managers and leading politicians as well as in the hands of school kids and housewives. Some companies have acted against governments that supposedly do not adequately protect their intellectual property, the most dramatic example represented by the coalition of large multinationals in the pharmaceutical industry, the so-called ‘big pharma’, against the South African governments for infringement of their IPRs on anti-HIV drugs (Fisher and Rigamonti 2005). In other occasions, the controversies do not directly involve competing companies, but rather the national governments themselves. This is, for example, the case with current controversies debated at the World Trade Organization (WTO) under the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement. These controversies reflect the fact that in the current global economy, knowledge and intangibles have become increasingly important bot
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