How Privatization and Monopolization Discourage Creativity and Invention

2012-02-17T04:55:00.000-08:00

If it is true, as we have argued, that the global IP regime as presently constituted shows a tendency to privatisation and monopolisation of content and channels of communication, then the next question must be what impact – if any – does this have on creativity and invention? The question can be analysed at two levels, namely the impact of the IP system on knowledge production at the individual level, and its impact, especially in the post-1994 phase of global capitalist development already identified, on the international division of labour. To put it another way: is it possible for the countries of the South (more commonly called ‘developing countries’) to realise their potential so long as rich countries control access to information capital?

The idea that copyright and patent protection function to encourage creative endeavours has its roots in the eighteenth century Enlightenment, and was made quite explicit from the very beginning of modern copyright. It can be convincingly argued that this discourse was as much an ideological falsification then, in the eighteenth century, as it clearly is now in the twenty-first. Indeed, Brendan Scott has contended that copyright was always designed to benefit publishers and distributors

If this is so, and if it can be shown creators’ motivations are complex and varied, then the argument that strong IP rights encourage innovation falls away. The question that remains is: do they have the inverse effect? rather than authors.

THE GLOBAL INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY SYSTEM IS PRIVATIZING HUMANITY’S COMMON CULTURAL HERITAGE - Inrtoduction

2012-02-17T04:37:00.000-08:00

Much of the dominant discourse around intellectual property (IP) – whether legal or sociological – starts from some largely unexamined assumptions. These are first that both the concept and the system are ‘good things’ socially and juridically, second that there is no alternative, and third that the system has worked well and continues to work well in pretty much the same way regardless of the specifics of time and place – in other words, through history and all over the world. There is, however, also a venerable and well-developed tradition of critical thinking about intellectual property – especially copyright and patents – which argues that as a system for rewarding creators it is inefficient, as an economic mechanism it amounts to a restraint on free trade, and over time it has increasingly placed more and more control over recorded human knowledge in fewer and fewer corporate hands. This is the dissident intellectual tradition from which the Copy/South project has emerged, and it is one that is increasingly gathering support across the political spectrum.

The Copy/South Project believes that, contrary to the tenor of the dominant copyright and IP discourse, it can quite easily and convincingly be shown that the global IP system, and specifically copyright, tends through privatisation to concentrate control of humanity’s common cultural heritage in the hands of a shrinking number of private owners, and that this tendency has a demonstrably negative effect on the well-being of the majority of the world’s poor people, most of whom live in the global South.

This was the first proposition that the Copy/South Project began to investigate. We believe that the tendency to privatisation – the workings of which we will describe in this section – is pernicious for several reasons. We intend to focus on two main areas of creative discourse, both of them fundamental to social and economic development. These are cultural diversity and access to teaching and educational materials (including scholarly ommunication). It is intuitively clear that private control of either content or the channels of communication through which content is delivered, in either of these areas, is likely to result in short-term market forces becoming determinant in deciding what is preserved, taught, delivered or developed, and what is discarded, dumped or abandoned. This is a problem for several of the reasons discussed in the following sections.

Money

How Privatization and Monopolization Discourage Creativity and Invention

THE GLOBAL INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY SYSTEM IS PRIVATIZING HUMANITY’S COMMON CULTURAL HERITAGE - Inrtoduction