CMN317 - Module 5

Okay, welcome back to part two.

So as I was saying, there's a narrative or discourse

that's promoted by the defenders of intellectual property that advances

this idea that I p is a a natural or

innate way to order our affairs to regulate culture.

Ah, nde expression and innovation is the best way to

do that.

Okay, let me just skim through the slides to get

to where we need to be on dhe.

That's over here on dhe that narrative as well as

providing kind of sort of a general justification for intellectual

property. Um, it also, you know, provides a sort of

a deflection strategy because it distracts us from the rather

unsavory business of intellectual property policy making.

Because after all, if intellectual property is the right and

the natural way to regulate knowledge, then the whole policy

bit the whole kind of how they actually make the

sausage is just the technical manifestation.

There's nothing really to see here.

But if we imagine there is a strong public interest

perspective to intellectual property, and that idea is is very

much contested, Um, if it does constitute a social goodbye

by encouraging the supply of labor intensive creation and innovation,

you know, that enrich our culture and our economy on,

you know, therefore, increase our quality of life.

Then we might actually be quite shocked to find out

how these policies come about on the extent to which

they've become unmoored from any public interest foundation.

Instead, they've driven almost exclusively by the goal off maximizing

corporate profit.

And it's become as the legal scholar Susan Cell, whose

three author of one of your readings, actually, for Week

six. She describes it as private interests making public law.

So it therefore becomes essential to understand what those private

interests are and how they're served.

By the way the I P policies are created.

If we consider the fact that in 2016 thistles some

of the most recent kind of concrete data I could

find on this it i p intensive industries so that

you know, aerospace, pharmaceuticals, agri business, cultural industries, electrical technology,

they contributed nearly 40% of U.

S. GDP or $6 trillion a ZX well, a supporting

40 million jobs.

Um, that helps us to appreciate the scale of ikan

economic interests at stake in maintaining the I P system

and following from that understanding for trying to grasp of

the relationship between all that economic power and how it

connects to public interest, that we're interested in what's called

political economy, which again is something I've reiterated over the

past few weeks.

So our first stop then is going to be examined

to take a better look at the form that the

intellectual property regime takes by looking at how I P

policy making comes about how major economic interests shape the

process to their own benefit.

On going to take a look at one of the

most sort of probably the most iconic examples off private

interests hijacking the public interest in order to advance an

I P agenda.

Ah, nde.

You know, we live in a lamentably in a world

off conspiracies.

I'm sure you could think of a few.

You know, we're really living in the sort of high

water mark off the conspiracy theory.

You know, there's any number of ones you could think

about in relation to covert 19 for, you know, in

terms off a sort of global global political situation generally,

why is it why why are we so seduced by

the conspiracy because it provides a kind of a short

cut toe understanding a world of almost mind boggling complexity.

The conspiracy allows one ovary clear, a neat sort of

perception of the world.

And why, why things are as they are, you m

In the case of the case study I'm about to

present, it really does kind of corresponds to the archetype

of conspiracy.

Through theory, you've got a bunch of old white dudes

in a smoky room coming up with a way to

change and effectively ruled the world.

But this isn't a conspiracy theory.

This is based on exhaustive academic work by the likes

of Dray horse Susan Sell Braithwaite.

Um, they've dug into the archives here.

They've interviewed schools of people to come up with to

come up with this definitive account of how this law

called. Trips came about one that's had major global ramifications.

So in the early eighties, three United States was a

power that was rocking its its global economic hegemony seemed

to be under threat.

It's, you know, it's status is kind of an industrial

powerhouse was waning.

You had the sort of rising economic powers of the

Eastern Tigers that manufacturing prowess of Japan, South Korea, et

cetera on dhe.

There was a great deal of anxiety in the United

States amongst the political class amongst its corporations amongst the

population at large in the early eighties.

12 major corporations all household names.

IBM, Pfizer, General Electric, General Motors, Hewlett Packard.

They came to bet together to create a committee to

lobby the U.

S. Government to persuade them to take intellectual property more

seriously to make it a policy priority.

They created think tanks, they wrote, wrote op EDS in

the newspapers.

They hired lobbyists to try and influence the right politicians

on this story they told was, was powerful, simple and

seductive. America needed stronger property rights to better protect American

ideas and, by extension, American industry.

Better protection Protection for those would mean more jobs on

dhe. Those industries would would drive the United States back

to its You know its rightful place is is the

number one economic power in the world, and this was

always going to be a persuasive story.

And amidst this kind of climate of anxiety and uncertainty

about America's place in the world and they're big shot

to really turn these ideas into something concrete, something that

could really shape the global political economy came with a

set of trade talks.

Global trade talks, called the GATT the General Agreement on

Tariffs and Trade that was taking place in 1986.

Now, the main purpose of these negotiations actually to create

conditions for free trade, especially in agriculture to, you know,

to eliminate, uh, tariffs and barriers to agricultural commodities being

traded around the world s o.

It was a ambitious on a not necessarily intuitive moved

to try and insert intellectual property into these talks because

intellectual property is all about rather than free trade is

all about imposing scarcity barriers and constraints around the flow

of culture and media so as to maximize the control

over the commodity and to maximize the profit on ah

nde the message waas that you know, the industries that

the U.

S government needed most protecting these talks were with those

with the big I p portfolios.

Whether that was the pharmaceutical industry protecting patents on their

drugs, whether it was the technology companies that were protecting

patents on their semiconductor chips or whether it was copyright,

um protecting the cultural goods of the likes of Disney

and 20th Century Fox.

And how do you?

I mean, it was clear how these 12 big corporations

sold this idea to the U.

S. Government.

But what about the rest of the world?

Well, the answer which these guys figured out was that

you make I p accepting There their package on I

p contingent alot rest I.

If you want to sell your rice in your soy

and your steel into the United States, then you need

to accept these patterns these extensions on copyright and patterns.

It's all or nothing.

And over the course of eight years of agonized negotiations,

wth e end result was a spectacular win for these

12 old dudes in the smoky room, their vision of

kind of profitable knowledge monopolies being extended and protected worldwide.

In effect, you had this instance of 12 corporations making

public law for the world.

This map down here at the bottom of the slide

shows in green.

All of the countries that were signatories to the trips

agreement. That's the the trade related aspects of intellectual property

that was signed in 1994 on Created also the W.

T. o the World Trade Organization and you've got these

these countries that marked in blue on dhe They were

the resistors who didn't sign on, which is, you know,

a very marginal slice of wth e global population.

And so what was extraordinary about the creation of this

trips accord was it was for several reasons there was.

It was notable because it imposed new laws rather being

based on negotiation and consensus.

The United States trade negotiators, backed by these three dozen

corporations, really imposed this agenda on the rest of the

world. It was a really dramatic expansion in the scope

of I p laws.

Um, it created this new organization, the World Trade Organization.

There's a compliance watchdog that could, that could impose sanctions

on any government in the world.

Didn't live up to its obligations through the Trips agreement.

It created this sort of harmonizing one size fits all

I p regime for the entire world to regardless of

the priorities you might have in your own society.

The trips accord imposed a Knipe framework for your for

your country to follow on the elevated What?

What? The final point that was extraordinary around trips was

elevated corporate over national interests.

A rather than national sovereignty was about these corporations and

their desire to control information on dhe innovation in the

global context.

Um, on dhe, what were the implications for countries in

the global South, where you had new forms of intellectual

property that covered things like semiconductor chips?

You had new categories off protected expression that were now

included under the under the banner of copyright, which protected

things like software databases, sound recordings.

You have patents now for nearly everything pretty much except

living organisms wth e duration of copyright was extended to

the life of the creator, plus 50 years before it

would enter into the public domain.

Same for patterns on dhe.

Now, instead of a civil prosecution for any violation of

someone's intellectual property rights, you were now subject to a

criminal criminal prosecution.

If you were found to have violated any I P

laws that were included in this Trips agreement on DSO,

the implications for the Global South were enormous.

You have you had you know, this situation where the

Global North would be extracting license fees to use certain

technologies or thio, or to consume certain cultural goods from

small nations that were dependent on technol technological and cultural

imports on so that that balance of trade overwhelmingly favored

the United States and also their allies, Europe and Japan.

It eroded national sovereignty, so eroded a country's right to

make its own laws around how intellectual property should be

governed. It implied kind of global cultural, homogeneous ization way

looked at this idea of cultural imperialism that this is

kind of cultural imperialism as codified in law.

Really, because if the United States media or media organizations

were the big winners out of this on DSO, it

meant that they could.

They were much better place to be able.

Thio export their media and cultural goods on it ignored

local approaches to intellectual property that there's there's many different

cultural perspectives when it comes to intellectual property and the

rights and wrongs off it.

But in instead off permitting societies to develop their own

frameworks that you know that the endogenous Lee that would

you know that suited their own their own cultural perspectives.

This kind of American, uh, produced vision of what intellectual

property waas and should be was imposed upon them on,

and it created these kind of global oligopolies led by

U. S.

Corporations in the fields off media, culture and technology on

dhe. That was just the start.

That that that this was this was ratified in the

mid nineties on was really kind of the the beginning

of a new era in a global intellectual property and

copyright on dhe.

That was kind of that this took place in the

legal realm.

And what we're gonna be talking about in a class

on Tuesday is kind of the corollary to that which

the technological side, which relates to the Gillespie reading because

the fears of digital copyright violations that really started to

emerge in the mid to late nineties meant that the

law wasn't enough anymore, there needed to be new kind

of technological means of control.

Digital rights management on dhe that on the kind of

mawr updated versions of that, the more contemporary versions of

what we're gonna discuss in part on Tuesday.

Okay, Well, thank you very much for your attention.

Look forward to seeing you on Tuesday.

CMN317 - Module 5

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