Trading our intellectual property for a lamb chop ...

In the 1970s, two very powerful US businessmen got together: their names were John Opel, CEO of IBM, and Edmund Pratt, the CEO of the giant pharmaceutical company, Pfizer, and they were both in the IP/patent business.

They understood that the world’s economy was shifting to a knowledge based foundation, and that if they wanted to protect - and expand - their commercial interests, they needed to change the way that IP was managed at the international level.

The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) was the international forum for legal debates and treaties at that time. It was an agency of the United Nations and all member nations had a vote. Not surprisingly, the poorer nations, the ones with little IP legislation (they had few patents or copyrights), generally outvoted the richer ones.

And one very rich nation, which held most of the world’s IP (much of which belonged to the companies of Mr Opel and Mr Pratt) was frustrated and provoked by this arrangement.

To John Opel and Edmund Pratt, WIPO was a most unsatisfactory forum for pushing their IP agenda. It was all talk. The US couldn’t get the decisions it wanted, and what’s more, as there were no penalties for countries that didn’t stick to the legal agreements - there was no point anyway!

These two captains of industry wanted an international body where they had more control. Where they could enforce the rules - and penalise any nation that “misused” (their) intellectual property. And they came up with a way to do it.

Along with a few of their friends - who were the CEOs of Hewlett Packard, General Motors, General Electric, Johnson and Johnson, Monsanto etc - they formed an association - and they changed the vocabulary: they started talking first about IP rights, and then about IP as property, and finally they made the shift to IP as trade!

These CEOs, who had their own agenda, reasoned (ingeniously) that most nations of the world complied with trade agreements. (Partly because tariff barriers, sanctions and penalties could be applied if they did not.) So if only IP could be treated as a form of trade rather than a legal agreement, they would be able to get a better deal for their patents, copyright and trademarks.

This was quite an achievement as there are difficulties in trading IP - which is an intangible - something you can’t see or touch. But having changed the way IP was seen they were able to move it from the legal realm where lawyers argued about rights - to the commercial world where businessmen did their deals with trade.

And the rest is history. Mainly US history.

From their efforts a new world order was created in April 1994 with the signing of TRIPS (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property). IP was taken out of the legal talk-fest and planted firmly in the hard-nosed business negotiations of trade. And the rules are clear; they favour the US multinationals.

This US achievement has been described as “an extraordinary coup of less than 50 individuals” by Pat Choate in his book Hot Property; the stealing of ideas in an age of globalisation: it’s something else to the Australians, Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite: