PATENT laws do little or nothing to help poor countries dig their way out of poverty, and could even make matters worse.
That鈥檚 the controversial conclusion of an independent commission on intellectual property rights appointed by the British government. Its report, launched in Geneva this week, contains 50 radical recommendations to help make these rights work to the advantage of the poor. Britain鈥檚 Department for International Development has already promised to look hard at the suggestions, but it鈥檚 unclear whether the rest of the international community will listen.
The World Trade Organization has persuaded most countries to sign an intellectual property rights (IPR) agreement that obliges them to impose Western-style laws on everything from patents to copyrights by 2006. But the new report argues that these laws only benefit rich countries with strong traditions of invention, and do little to aid the transfer of technology to the poor. 鈥淲e find that IPRs are unlikely to help alleviate poverty,鈥� says John Barton, chairman of the Commission on Intellectual Property Rights and professor of law at Stanford University. The report argues that poor countries should be given a lot more leeway to customise those laws, and up to a decade longer to do so.
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At present, many poor countries don鈥檛 have intellectual property laws at all. That means local inventors can鈥檛 get protection for their ideas, but it also means people can buy cheap versions of medicine or software that have been patented elsewhere. 鈥淚PRs raise the consumer prices for drugs, seeds and computer programs,鈥� said Barton at a briefing on the report last week in London. Since poor countries often have little to patent in the first place, the benefits of having no laws can outweigh the disadvantages.
To help remedy this, the report argues that traditional knowledge should be placed on the same legal footing as published scientific data when attempting to prove ownership of ideas. This would be of crucial value to poorer countries who want to block Western pharmaceuticals 鈥渂iopirates鈥� from patenting their herbal cures. Traditional knowledge is usually dismissed as irrelevant in patent disputes, so lengthy campaigns to rescue things such as an Indian basmati rice species or the appetite-suppressing Hoodia cactus (see Picture) used by native tribes in Africa from patent 鈥減irates鈥� have been only partly successful. That needs to change, says the report.
The commission also advocates differential pricing of medicines, and demands that Internet access be kept free of copyright restrictions which could exclude the poor. They call on all rich governments to boost publicly funded pharmaceutical and agricultural research for the public good rather than just commercial gain.
But not everyone accepts the report鈥檚 central conclusion that intellectual property rights don鈥檛 help impoverished countries. 鈥淲e disagree totally, and believe that patents greatly contribute to economic growth and social and technological development,鈥� says Yo Takagi, a senior strategy director at the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva. Takagi says there is plenty of flexibility written into the IPR agreements and sufficient time to comply.
But the commission points out that other countries that have had technology booms, like Japan and Korea, did so with weaker IPR systems than those now prescribed by the WTO. l