I don't want to delay the book or add to your labor, Doug, so I just hope your IP discussion makes up in quality what it might lack in quantity. Long ago on the list I characterized IP as the soft underbelly of global capitalism, and I'm more than ever convinced that is so. I think that the current struggle between research-based pharmaceutical companies and poor nations over access to AIDS drugs and other key medicines is just a forerunner of intensely bitter North-South IP struggles to come.
It's not at clear to me how capitalists can win those fights, since the often terrible human costs of patent protection are so hard to hide. This chilling item appeared in a NY Times article, "As Devastating Epidemics Increase, Nations Take on Drug Companies," July 9 this year: "[When the South African government threatened to void drug patents,] the South African pharmaceutical industry, which included subsidiaries of American and European companies ... closed factories, canceled investments and took out scare ads suggesting that babies could be hurt by counterfeit generic drugs.
Its chief lobbyist, Mirryena Deeb, threatened to cut off all new drug discoveries to South Africa if the law passed, including AIDS drugs, cancer drugs and antibiotics. Asked in a March 1998 interview is she was literally threatening to let thousands of South Africans die, she reluctantly conceded: 'In so many words, yes.'" No amount of PR can get around a statement like that.
Carl
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