Intellectual Property Rights Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Intellectual property refers to patents, copyright, trademarks, and trade secrets. Intellectual proper ty poses interesting problems because, unlike physical property, knowledge goods and information are not necessarily rivalries. Simultaneous usage of such goods rarely detracts from their social utility. As they are not physical property, knowledge and information are not formally scarce. Intellectual property constructs scarcity by treating it as an exclusively owned commodity.

Persons granted intellectual property rights have the power to withhold their intellectual property and to prevent others from using it. Many regard intellectual property as providing incentives to innovate and disseminate creative work; with intellectual property rights, individuals and companies reap rewards from their innovations, whereas without them, they would not profit from their time and investment.

Historically, governments employed intellectual property policies to promote development goals. Initially granted as exceptions to rules against monopoly, over time and especially beginning in the mid-twentieth century, intellectual property owners have come to regard them as rights. Property rights are quintessentially political, and given the increasing importance of intellectual property in the global economy, political scientists have begun to address the politics of intellectual property.

Early political science scholarship on the politics of intellectual property focused on multilateral negotiations over revisions to the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property that the World Intellectual Property Organization administers. In the 1970s and early 1980s, developing countries pressed for the New International Economic Order; they sought a weakening of laws governing intellectual property protection so that they could acquire greater access to knowledge goods. States abandoned these negotiations in the face of the 1980s debt crisis. A second wave of political science scholarship traced the incorporation of intellectual property into the multilateral trading regime (first the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs and now the World Trade Organization). Member states incorporated the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) into the World Trade Organization at the end of the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations in 1994. All member states are required to comply with TRIPs or face the prospect of trade sanctions.

Scholars increasingly focused on the politics of intellectual property in the face of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in subSaharan Africa and Asia. Some scholars focused on intellectual property and its impact on access to lifesaving medicines. In 2001 World Trade Organization member states passed the Doha Declaration on Public Health and Access to Medicines, affirming that nothing in TRIPs should prevent countries from providing lifesaving medicines to their citizens. Other scholars focused on the nexus between intellectual property, HIV/AIDS, and the implications for national security. The politics of intellectual property has been featured in literatures on nongovernmental organizations (especially concerning access to patented medicines and educational materials), grassroots activist campaigns, international regime complexes, forum shifting, bargaining, and the role of private power in the global economy.

Many international relations treatments of intellectual property rights have focused on norm setting across diverse multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Food and Agriculture Organization, and the World Intellectual Property Organization. Scholarship has also examined vertical forum shifting between multilateral, plurilateral, regional, and bilateral arenas for agenda setting, norm setting, surveillance, and enforcement. Analyses have evolved from the initial macro-level international relations treatments of norm setting and rulemaking in the trade regime to in-depth comparative and domestic politics treatments. Recent scholarship highlights aspects such as technical assistance, capacity building, and policy implementation.

Further work examines the intellectual property enforcement agenda, locating it in the literature on global business regulation. Heightened interest in a development agenda has renewed scholarly attention to intellectual property policy as a means to an end rather than as an end in itself. For example, intellectual property policy can be tailored to meet diverse development goals such as technology transfer (particularly salient in climate change deliberations), national innovation strategies, and access to educational materials and digital media. The World Intellectual Property Organization is engaged in discussions with member states about a Development Agenda that includes considerations such as the status of so-called traditional knowledge, folklore, and wild cultivars. At the same time, a number of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries are negotiating an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement in an effort to put an end to software piracy and trademark counterfeiting. The politics of intellectual property has proven to be a fruitful and dynamic area of political science research.

Bibliography:

Deere, C. The Implementation Game: The TRIPS Agreement and the Global Politics of Intellectual Property Reform in Developing Countries. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Drahos, P., and J. Braithwaite. Global Business Regulation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Marlin-Bennett, R. Knowledge Power: Intellectual Property, Information, and Privacy. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2004.
May, C. A Global Political Economy of Intellectual Property Rights: The New Enclosures? London: Routledge, 2000.
May, C., and S. K. Sell. Intellectual Property Rights: A Critical History. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2005.
Mertha, A. The Politics of Piracy: Intellectual Property in Contemporary China. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007.
Raustiala, K., and D. Victor. “The Regime Complex for Plant Genetic Resources.” International Organization 58, no. 2 (2004): 277–309.
Sell, S. K. Power and Ideas: The North-South Politics of Intellectual Property and Anti-trust. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.
Private Power, Public Law: The Globalization of Intellectual Property Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Shadlen, K., A. Schrank, and M. Kurtz. “The Political Economy of Intellectual Property Protection:The Case of Software.” International Studies Quarterly 49, no. 1 (2005): 45–71.

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