Good NYT piece about intellectual property regimes in the developing world. The author notes that developing countries usually provide for very weak intellectual property protection, scooping up foreign ideas at speed and implementing them locally to bootstrap local culture and industry — that's what the USA did when it failed to honor foreign copyrights for the first century that this country existed.
But the USA has since been instrumental in pushing through international treaties (like "Trips") that force poor and developing countries to eschew this critical bootstrap, which has led to tremedous social harm, as when countries are forced to honor foreign pharmaceutical patents that price AIDS-fighting drugs out of their range.
The concern about Trips is that it is too much of a one-size-fits-all approach that works to the detriment of developing nations. "It would be fine if we lived in a world of all rich people," said Jeffrey D. Sachs, a development economist at Columbia University. "The danger with Trips is that it will mostly hurt the developing countries' access to ideas."
The report of the intellectual property rights commission, which was sponsored by the British government, includes a long list of recommendations, some of which would be anathema to American companies:
* Encourage developing nations to make greater use of compulsory licensing of drugs.
* Allow more "reverse engineering" of software programs — that is, copying a product by studying and making educated assumptions about the underlying code.
* Permit "cracking" of software used to protect copyrighted digital media, if the country determines that the copy-protection technology limits the fair use of digital text, video or music.
(via /.)
