I read the following in James Surowiecki's May 14, 2007 New Yorker column, titled "Exporting I.P.":

Our recent free-trade agreement with South Korea is a good example. Most of the deal is concerned with lowering tariffs, opening markets to competititon, and the like, but an important chunk has nothing to do with free trade at all. Instead, it requires South Korea to rewrite its rules on intellectual property, or I.P. -- the rules that deal with patents, copyright, and so on. South Korea will now have to adopt the U.S. and E.U. definition of copyright -- extending it to seventy years after the death of the author. South Korea will also have to change its rules on patents, and may have to change its national-health-care policy of reimbursing patients only for certain drugs. All these changes will give current patent and copyright holders stronger protection for longer. Recent free-trade agreements with Peru and Colombia insisted on much the same terms. And CAFTA -- a free-trade agreement with countries in Central America and the Caribbean -- included not just longer copyright and trademark protection but also a dramatic revision in those countries' patent policies.

Given that the most of the world's patents, copyrights, etc., are owned by the American and multinational corporations that dominate US politics, and especially trade policy, these deals are little more than a legalistic method for the rich to collect rents from the poor. This is simply one more obstacle that prevents developing countries from advancing toward a more equitable standard of living with those countries who have a head start staking out their legal turf. This is a big problem, but we have trouble even conceiving of it.

As Richard Stallman likes to point out, "intellectual property" is a mixed bag with little coherency to it. Copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc., are different beasts, united only in that they favor those who rely most heavily on lawyers. Of these, the worst by far are patents. Copyrights at least apply to works that are distinctive due to their complexity and that are inessential: e.g., my writing a novel doesn't prevent you from writing a novel, because there's no way that two independently created novels will match. But with patents, which are allowed on relatively generic ideas, that happens all the time -- distinguishing priority in patents often reduces to a legal contest, which favors the politically connected. (Note the terms that the trade agreements dictate: that other countries recognize the patents that the US Patent Office recognizes.) An even bigger problem with patents is that we grant monopoly rights to their holders. This encourages companies to price covered products to whatever formula maximizes their return -- in the case of a uniquely effective medicine, this may literally mean your money or your life. This also lets companies use their legal position to frustrate competition. One irony here is that the effect of patent extension is the opposite of free trade.

One reason we have patents is that economists propagate myths about their value. Surowiecki does his part by saying: "Intellectual-property rules are clearly necessary to spur innovation: if every invention could be stolen, or every new drug immediately copied, few people would invest in innovation." Actually, by people he means corporations: few corporations would invest in developing proprietary monopolies, which is kind of a tautology. Innovation is actually a broader form of activity, inasmuch as much innovation currently goes unpatented. Patents actually have much more to do with the legal culture of the corporation than with the scientists and engineers who do research and development. Moreover, much discovery and innovation, including virtually the entire development of 20th century science, takes place outside of corporate labs. But even if you buy the argument that the loss of patent monopolies might reduce privately funded innovation, it would be trivial to compensate for that with public funding. And the returns of such funding would be greater, because all ideas would be subject to public scrutiny and improvement, and any could be adopted without the burden of monopoly rents.

The big money in patents these days is in pharmaceuticals, a story that provides ample evidence why patents are bad even within the US. The extraordinary profits attainable via patents steers privately funded research toward patentable products, away from any refinement of proven generic treatments. The research is mostly done in secret, where other researchers cannot critique or contribute. The results, and their marketing, are colored by business interests. One result is that prices increase, as opposed to most other development areas, where innovations aim to lower costs and, in the absence of patents, prices. As these costs are ultimately paid for by everyone, either privately or through government, it should be easy to see that public funding of pharmaceutical research would save money and result in more effective development. Yet even among people who realize the urgent need for health care reform, very few even broach the issue of patents.

Heavy lobbying by interested parties has managed to keep patents and copyrights out of the political debate, except when they try to push those rights even further. In the case of trade agreements, they argue that enforcing their monopolies worldwide will help to reverse America's trade deficits. This not only ignores the fact that hardly any Americans actually benefit from those monopolies. It also ignores the fact that intellectual property owners are increasingly foreign and/or multinational corporations. Just one example is that none of the four music majors is American owned. The pharmaceutical industry is little different.

It wasn't always like this. Developing countries should consider America's own example. Surowiecki writes:

The great irony is that the U.S. economy in its early years was built in large part on a lax attitude toward intellectual property rights and enforcement. As historian Doron Ben-Atar shows in his book Trade Secrets, the Founders believed that a strict attitude toward patents and copyright would limit domestic innovation and make it harder for the U.S. to expand its industrial base. American law did not protect the rights of foreign inventors or writers, and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, in his famous "Report on Manufactures," of 1791, actively advocated the theft of technology and the luring of skilled workers from foreign countries. Among the beneficiaries of this was the American textile industry, which flourished thanks to pirated technology.

There's a lot more to be written about these issues, but the point that struck me most strongly about this piece is that we are stuck in a mental rut here that is leading us to do exactly the wrong things. And I say "we" here because this isn't just a Bush thing -- Clinton was every bit as happy to curry favor from IP profiteers. The same stupid repetition of economic myths favoring monopolies is part of the general pall of dark ages descending upon us. Unless we start to push back that tide, we are doomed.