FITUG e.V.
Förderverein Informationstechnik und Gesellschaft
FITUG e.V.Förderverein Informationstechnik und Gesellschaft |
|
------- Forwarded message follows ------- Date sent: Wed, 20 Nov 2002 13:58:56 -0500 To: politech@politechbot.com From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> Subject: FC: Weakened intellectual property rights ends in suffering, death? Send reply to: declan@well.com
Death and Suffering as the Unintended Consequences of Trade Negotiations By Tom Giovanetti
If the study of public policy teaches us anything, it is that political solutions usually have unintended and frequently negative consequences. This is known as the "Law of Unintended Consequences," which asserts that we cannot always predict the results of a change in government policy.
Next week, at the next round of negotiations for the Doha Declaration on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), the United States, at the hands of U.S. Trade Representative, Robert Zoellick, is apparently going to stumble into the Law of Unintended Consequences, and the result could be the unnecessary death and suffering of thousands of people in the future.
There is a great deal of death and suffering going on in the Third World as a result of such diseases as AIDs. The solution is the continued innovation and better distribution of lifesaving pharmaceutical products, as well as the long-term development of these countries. The pharmaceutical industry has developed a number of drugs that successfully treat, to various degrees, AIDs and its related complexes, and these companies are doing everything they can to get these drugs to needy countries at very low prices?sometimes even for free. More often than not, it is not the availability of low-cost drugs that is the problem in those countries?it is the utter lack of a distribution network, and the lack of adequate health care providers to make effective use of the drugs that have been made available.
Big, profitable pharmaceutical companies are the best friends an AIDs victim in a Third World country could ever have. They are innovating the drugs, and making them available. These companies should be hailed as heroes in the global fight against AIDs.
But left-leaning activists, who always seem to see the United States and capitalism as the source of the world's problems, see things differently. They think that the U.S., and pharmaceutical companies, are the villains, and they are proposing with breathtaking boldness the legalized theft of drug patents by Third World countries.
The vehicle for this assault has been paragraph 6 of the declaration promulgated at the WTO meeting in Doha. It states that the poorest countries would be entitled to declare a public health emergency and compel the licensing of drugs to treat HIV, malaria and tuberculosis ? diseases that are particular scourges of the developing world. It is important to state that no one, including the pharmaceutical industry, objects to this provision.
However, in the current round of TRIPs negotiations, activists are asserting the right of any developing country to seize any patent, or import any generic drug, so long as it claims that is has a public health crisis. They would not confine this right to the three diseases specified at Doha. This represents a global assault on intellectual property of unprecedented proportions. And the U.S. position, suggested by Representative Zoellick's statements, is apparently to cave in to these radical demands. Although he has stated that the US does not share the activists' interpretation of the declaration, he has not insisted on legally-binding language that would limit the seizure of patents to TB, HIV and malaria.
To weaken international patent protection and allow any developing country to steal and nationalize the intellectual property of pharmaceutical companies will be perhaps the most glaring and destructive example of the Law of Unintended Consequences in recent memory. If Representative Zoellick caves in to the radical activists, it will be the end of intellectual property protection in the Third World.
Strong intellectual property protection is a hallmark of every advanced economy. Any hope these countries have of "developing" is at least partially dependent on their development of private property protection, including intellectual property protection. Without intellectual property protection, these Third World countries will never develop to their full economic potential. Without intellectual property protection, a country is not developing?it is stagnant.
Perhaps even more important, if the property rights of drug companies can be legally stripped away, they will become less profitable, which is perhaps an ancillary goal of the activists. Why should a company spend millions of dollars to develop a new drug if a dozen or so countries can immediately steal the patent and begin producing bootleg versions of the drug, with the blessing of the U.S. government?
For the United States to endorse the legalized theft of intellectual property will betray our principles, set a bad example for developing countries, and result in fewer new drugs created. And that means diseases not cured and pain not relieved in the United States, as well as the developing world.
__________________ Tom Giovanetti is president of the Institute for Policy Innovation, a public policy think tank based in Dallas, Texas.
---------------------------------------------------------------------- --- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- --- Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/ Recent CNET News.com articles: http://news.search.com/search?q=declan ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ---
------- End of forwarded message -------