Decentering Biotechnology by Carolan Michael S

Author:Carolan, Michael S.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2010-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Fiction of the “Information” Revolution

The aforementioned “agreements” create an understanding of biotechnology that resides outside of time. It does this by making it appear as though less developed nations not only need strong IPR to develop but that economic growth will only be realized after a global harmonization of these rights is reached. This fictitious narrative, however, masks the fact that countries with the most economic power today spent decades developing in a world with weak IPR protections. Even the experience of so-called Newly Industrialized Countries has been helped along considerably from the presence of weak international IPR (pre-TRIPs). As Nagesh Kumar (2003: 216) explains:

[E]ast Asian countries, viz., Japan, Korea and Taiwan have absorbed substantial amount[s] of technological learning under weak IPR protection regime[s] during the early phases of [development]. These patent regimes facilitated the absorption of innovation and knowledge generated abroad by their indigenous firms.

Studies examining the role of patents during the industrial revolutions of Britain and Germany note the importance of “leaky” intellectual property regimes for economic development (see Arewa 2007; Khan 2005). We must also remember that the US was once a developing country with a lower standard of living than many countries in South America. As two economists note: “Even on the eve of the Declaration of Independence the US was an undistinguished developing country with an agricultural economy, rural production, and few pretensions to local cultural output” (Sokoloff and Engerman 2000: 232). Did the economic ascendency of the US happen because of strong international patent standards; the same standards it now demands the rest of the world adopt? While domestic inventors may have enjoyed strong patent protections (as earlier described) the same could not be said of inventors from other countries. A wealth of historical research in fact points to what can only be described as the aggressive technological piracy of the US well into the twentieth century (see Coombe 1998; May and Sell 2006; Noble 1977).

It is interesting how developed nations like the US, the most ardent supporter of these harmonization agreements, themselves denied protection to foreign technology when they where a young, developing state. The US, for example, ignored foreign copyrights until 1891 and maintained a manufacturing clause in its copyright law until 1986 that limited foreign copyright holders’ rights to products produced within the US. And the arguments used to justify these policies sound remarkably similar to those coming out of developing countries today. Nor was the US alone in refusing to offer IPR protections to foreign inventors. In the Netherlands (lacking a patent law until 1910), Royal Philips Electronics formed in 1891 to exploit Thomas Edison’s and Joseph Swan’s carbon filament lamp, which they did by reverse engineering the technology. In Sweden, Ericsson was formed in 1876 and by 1878 was selling reproductions of Alexander Graham Bell’s phones. Or take Japan: although Texas Instruments filed a patent with the Japan Patent Office in 1960 for the integrated circuit, it took patent officials 29 years to grant the patent, during which

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.