Intellectual Property (Book/Article Recs)

The SPGB has a member who is keen on copyright theory and has spoken at meetings and written on the subject .

http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/jan06/text/page6.html
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/jan06/text/page7.html

some related extracts from other articles

Patent and copyright laws exist to ‘protect’ their authors and to provide a profit incentive to develop new ideas and technologies, according to the lobby which advocates strengthening patent law. But this lobby generally consists of large companies who have zealously bought up libraries of patents in order to lock out competitors, while the opponents of patent restrictions tend to be small companies unable to get a foot in the door, and who argue that such restrictions hold back development.

Human Genome Sciences of Maryland are well known for patenting much of the human genome, and once tried to patent one of the bacteria that causes meningitis, while Incyte Pharmaceuticals of Palo Alto, California own the patent on Staphylococcus aureus, a species whose study is crucial because it is known to evolve resistance to antibiotics (New Scientist, May 16, 1998).

An independent commission on intellectual property rights reported in 2002 that the World Trade Organisation were strong-arming developing countries into signing intellectual property rights (IPR) agreements which were of no benefit to them, because they had very little to patent, but instead force up prices and inhibit technology transfer. The report concluded that IPRs effectively rip off poor countries (New Scientist, Sept 21, 2002).

This accord was designed to enforce an international system of 'intellectual property rights.' Intellectual property can be defined as follows:

Intellectual property confers on individuals, enterprises or other entities the right to exclude others from the use of specific intangible creations.(http://www.southcentre.org.sg/.)

'Intangible' here means an idea or piece of information that can be incorporated into a tangible object rather than simply the object itself. The T.R.I.P.s accord applied, for example, to industrial designs such as semi-conductors and computer chips. It granted a 'generalised minimum patent' protection of twenty years.

Transnational corporations in particular stood to benefit from the accord as it was in the main, their goods that this accord enabled them to patent. As The Ecologist observes, "the T.R.I.P.s accord is a victory for the U.S. high-tech industry, which has long been lobbying for stronger controls over the diffusion of innovations." (20; p37) The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (U.N.C.T.A.D.) describes the accord as a "premature strengthening of the international intellectual property system… that favors monopolistically controlled innovation over broad-based diffusion."

It has therefore been argued by critics that T.R.I.P.s is not actually 'free trade' legislation at all but is instead a licence enabling large multinational companies to appropriate 'intellectual property' that originated in the countries of the South. That it is a reflection of the interests of multinational companies of the North rather than an impartial set of rules is pointed out by the website Southcentre.org T.R.I.P.s legislation was not applied to certain types of rights (namely "utility models" (mechanical designs) and "breeders' rights" (e.g. for new plant varieties). SouthCentre.org states:

The absence of these two categories may be explained by the relative lack of interest on the part of the major industrialized countries (and the industrial.

lobbies that actively promoted the TRIPs negotiations) in these categories.(29)
It is pointed out that T.R.I.P.s make illegal the exact practice that was key to the industrial development of countries such as the U.S.A. and Gernmany. As the Ecologist explains:

A key factor in their industrial take-off was their relatively easy access to cutting edge technology. The U.S. industrialised, to a great extent by using but paying very little for British manufacturing innovations, as did the Germans. Japan industrialised by liberally borrowing U.S. technological innovations, but barely compensating the Americans for this. And the Koreans industrialised by copying quite liberally and with little payment U.S. and Japanese produce and process technologies.(20; p37)

The issue of patents is always going to be thorny, because both arguments are correct – in capitalism. Ownership of intellectual property has to be protected in a property owning society, as anyone who has had their house burgled, their car stolen or their idea robbed will tend to agree, but there is no denying that intellectual property rights do indeed stifle innovation in every field, because of the tendency of patents to concentrate into the hands of the intellectual property rich. The scientific community is divided on the question, between those who believe in knowledge for its own sake and therefore wish to pool ideas, and those who wish to profit personally from their research by denying others access. Since this is precisely the same debate as between socialists and those who support capitalism, one might describe scientists who wish to abolish patent and copyright restrictions as closet socialists.

Science in fetters
Capitalism was once a progressive force in the field of science. The discoveries of chemistry and physics were essential for the advance of the new society. But now capitalism has entered its restrictive phase, where, because of copyright and information ownership, scientific investigation is being restricted. Immense publishing firms like Reed Elsevier zealously guard the copyrights that earned them profits of £231 million last year :

“More than 800 British researchers have joined 22,000 others from 161 countries in a campaign to boycott publishers of scientific journals who refuse to make research papers freely available on the internet after six months. 'Science depends on knowledge and technology being in the public domain', said Michael Ashburner, professor of Biology at Cambridge University and one of the leading signatories of the campaign, the Public Library of Sciences. 'In that sense, science belongs to the people, and the fruits of science shouldn't be owned or even transferred by publishers for huge profits'“ (Guardian, 26 May).

It seems that science is now being restricted by the ownership relationships of capitalism. Karl Marx wrote in January 1859 in his introduction to The Critique of Political Economy something that foresaw such a development:

“At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression of the same thing - with the property relations within which they had been at work before. From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters.”

Science and the profit motive
Inside socialist society the pursuit of knowledge will be free to all. There will be no restrictions on scientific investigation. This is impossible inside capitalism, with its copyright laws and its profit motive. Sir John Sulston, one of the leading researchers in the Human Genome Project has shown how powerful the profit motive is in science-based commerce. “We can't possibly prohibit discovery. But on the other hand to imagine that we should always exploit, especially if it makes extra money, is insane. I think most reasonable people, including those who run companies, would agree. The trouble is, once people get into a company boardroom, they have no other choice. They have shareholders. I am afraid you have to leave your principles at the door of the boardroom”, he says.” Guardian, 2 February.

Price-less information
There is a worse problem. Information, as a buy and sell commodity, carries a curse unknown to any other type of commodity. In the words of an old computer hacker slogan, "information wants to be free". When one disgruntled ex-employee of a software firm recently posted the company's products on a free website, the site was closed down in two hours. Yet twenty minutes would have been enough to start mirror sites containing the free software, at a stroke wiping out the firm's profits. It is worth recalling what really makes a commodity—it is restriction of access. Air is just about the only use-value in existence which is not yet a commodity, in other words it has no exchange value. If access cannot be restricted to a good, money cannot be charged for it. The unique property of information is that you can make infinite exact copies, you can "steal" it without removing the original, or leaving any trace of the "theft". Just as the music industry had to learn to live with music piracy (which of us does not have pirate tapes on our shelves?) so the information industry must live, not only with piracy, but an extremely short shelf-life. The price of any information commodity will tend towards zero more rapidly than any other commodity. The traditional product-cycle will contract to a single, sharp peak and steep descent. Whereas capitalists now salivate over a presumed bonanza this short-term pay-out will give way to a cut-throat and dog-eat-dog business world characterised by a falling rate of profit and a desperate race to stand still.

Impossible though it seems, it gets worse for capitalism. The goose could be laying a golden bomb. Unlike any other sector of production, the knowledge-producing sector which produced the Internet has always incorporated a strong ethical tendency towards free distribution—the gift economy. In a far-sighted study of Internet sociology, Richard Barbrook's essay on Cyber-communism (http://www.nettime.org/nettime.w3archive/199909/msg00046.html) argues powerfully that a knowledge-rich society will increasingly tend to share rather than sell, just as socialist common ownership is a logical adaptation to material abundance. In an ethical reversal, it is selling, not piracy, which will be seen as antisocial. All in all, capitalism would appear to be staking its future on a commodity it can never control:

"The scarcity of copyright cannot compete against the abundance of gifts . . . At the cutting edge of modernity, the exchange of commodities now plays a secondary role to the circulation of gifts. The enclosure of intellectual labour is challenged by a more efficient method of working: disclosure."

Barbrook foresees the collapse of production and market relations in the same way as other business observers have been worrying for years about the "technology paradox" of "zero cost production" in industry (Business Week, 6 March 1995). As the computer world gapes at the meteoric rise of a new operating system called Linux, designed by a student as an antidote to the "bloatware" of Microsoft and, more to the point, given away free as "Open Source", there does indeed seem to be some basis for the optimism of the gift economists. The implications for the future of capitalist market relations are huge and contentious. There are no guarantees that capitalism will drown in its own Third Wave, but equally there are no guarantees that it won't. But as if this wasn't enough, there arises a new problem which has no precedent and for which no avoidance strategies have yet been devised. In the knowledge explosion, what happens when we know too much?

hope this been a bit of a help to you