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• Monday, February 6, 2006 12:02 PM

  "intelllectual property" is the antithesis of free trade

  The international intellectual property regime forbids free trade on any goods or services affected by patents; instead, it designates one monopolist, usually a corporation, and gives it the sole right to sell the affected goods or services. The right can be sold, or bartered with other organizations that also have large numbers of patents. But new participants (read: third world countries, new startups without backing from established companies) are frozen out. WIPO, the GATT, NAFTA, and CAFTA have all expanded the scope of the patent regime, meaning that processes and compounds that nature invented can be patented. Traditional healers who rely on medicinal properties of plants could be found to be violating patents, even when the patent-holders learned about the properties from the very same traditional healers!

  Some of the proposals for fixing this attempt to sign up third world countries by offering a bit of graft: a payoff to the countries where the useful medicinal plants (or other substances) are found, in exchange for cementing corporate rights to patent the natural world (of course the elites and not the public would wind up with these payoffs). This is wrong. Patenting natural substances should be forbidden.

  —Joe Buck Read Joe Buck's other letters
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