I recently stumbled upon a rather impassioned intellectual property lecture by Joseph Stiglitz.  The Nobel Laureate gave the talk at Duke University’s Center for the Study of Public Domain in February 2007.   A transcript of the speech is included in the April 2008 issue of the Duke Law Journal.  The lecture touches on an array of subjects, if only tangentially, but the most interesting comments perhaps were in regards to the implementation of TRIPS.  At the risk of discussing a topic that is old hat (it was new to me), I’ve included two snipits below:

Joseph E. Stiglitz, Economic Foundations of Intellectual Property Rights, 57 Duke L.J. 1693 (2008).

[p 2] When I was at the Council of Economic Advisors we opposed the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement (TRIPS), part of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations. Interestingly, so did the Office of Science and Technology Policy. We were not alone in our opposition; indeed, it was a view held by many, if not most, of the people who understood the issues. These views stood in contrast to the views of most of the people who had some special interest on this issue, particularly from the pharmaceutical and entertainment industries, who argued that the stronger the intellectual property rights the better. When I went to the World Bank, I continued to be involved in the issue. We had concluded that what separates developed and developing countries is not just the disparity, the gap, in resources, but also the disparity in knowledge, and closing that gap in knowledge is an essential part of successful development. We had become concerned that TRIPS might make access to knowledge more difficult—and thus make closing the knowledge gap, and development more generally, more difficult. We also worried about the effects of TRIPS on access to life-saving medicines; TRIPS attempted (successfully) to restrict access to generic medicines, putting these drugs out of the financial reach of most in the developing countries.

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[p 9] One example that shows the magnitude of what is at stake (and that has received a lot of attention), are the AIDS drugs. One year’s treatment of the brand name drugs, not the most recent ones, but the older ones which are less expensive, costs $10,000.21 In a poor developing country, where the per capita income is $300, or even $3,000, a person with AIDS is not going to be able to afford $10,000. They might be able to afford the generic medicines, which sell for less than $200. When the trade ministers signed the TRIPS agreement in Marrakesh in the spring of 1994, they were in effect signing the death warrants on thousands of people in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere in the developing countries.