Full Description
In economic sectors crucial to human welfare - agriculture, education, and medicine - a small number of firms control global markets, primarily by enforcing intellectual property (IP) rights incorporated into trade agreements made in the 1980s onward. Such rights include patents on seeds and medicines, copyrights for educational texts, and trademarks in consumer products. According to conventional wisdom, these agreements likewise ended hopes for a 'New International Economic Order,' under which wealth would be redistributed from rich countries to poor. Sam F. Halabi turns this conventional wisdom on its head by demonstrating that the New International Economic Order never faded, but rather was redirected by other treaties, formed outside the nominally economic sphere, that protected poor countries' interests in education, health, and nutrition and resulted in redistribution and regulation. This illuminating work should be read by anyone seeking a nuanced view of how IP is shaping the global knowledge economy.
Contents
Introduction: global wealth and the rise of intellectual property; Part I. Movements in Global Wealth Creation and Redistribution: 1. Economic development in low- and middle-income countries after decolonization; 2. The expansion of international intellectual property protection; 3. The merger between international intellectual property, investment, and trade law; Part II. Rethinking Wealth: Firms, Basic Human Needs, and Technology: 4. The pivot to basic human needs; 5. The rise of supranational regulation of global firms; 6. Access to medicines and vaccines; 7. Food and agriculture; 8. Consumer products; 9. Educational and scientific printed works; Part III. International Intellectual Property Shelters: Redistributing Wealth and Regulating Oligopolies: 10. Medicines and vaccines; 11. Biological and plant genetic resources for agriculture; 12. Food and tobacco trademarks; 13. Limiting copyright; Part IV. International Intellectual Property Shelters, Wealth Redistribution, and the Supranational Regulation of Global Firms: 14. International intellectual property shelters as mechanisms of redistribution; 15. International intellectual property shelters and supranational regulation; Conclusion; Index.
