Protecting Intellectual Property - Please pass the salt
Posted by Dean Kleckner
Winston Churchill once attended a fancy dinner, where he was told that one of the guests had slipped a silver saltshaker into his pocket. Churchill then took the matching peppershaker and put it in his own pocket. At the conclusion of dinner, he sat down next to the thief and said, “Oh dear, we were seen. Perhaps we had both better put them back.”
I assume the trick worked--and that Churchill shamed his colleague into returning the saltshaker. It would be nice if theft were always so easy to correct.
But it’s not, and that’s especially true when it comes to ideas. In the United States and much of the Western world, we’ve created a reliable system of protecting intellectual property rights--copyrights, patents, and trademarks--to make sure that the immaterial property of the mind is guarded against the saltshaker thieves among us.
A lot of people wrongly assume that these protections exist everywhere. Unfortunately, they don’t. American laws only cover products inside the United States. This includes imports, of course, but for the most part intellectual property rights end at the border. They’re honored in many parts of the developed world, but they’re also dishonored in plenty of other places.
Consider China. Walk down a street in Shanghai, and it won’t take long to find a bootlegged version of the recent movie “Shanghai Knights.” People who buy copies will probably find the entertainment they’re looking for, but none of the proceeds will find its way back to the producers, directors, writers, or actors who made the movie possible. The movie is a piece of intellectual property, and it’s essentially been stolen. The problem is even worse for the music industry.
And it affects agriculture, too--and ordinary farmers who don’t anticipate ever holding a copyright, patent, or trademark in their own name still need to be concerned.
That’s because several countries are now trying to reap the benefits of agricultural biotechnology without having to open their markets to these products. Brazilian farmers, by law, aren’t allowed to grow gene-altered soybeans. Their country follows Europe in making a phony fuss over genetically modified crops. And yet about a third of Brazil’s soybean harvest is genetically modified, with seed smuggled in from Argentina, a neighboring country with biotech-friendly laws.
It’s hard to blame Brazilian farmers for wanting to use a safe product that boosts yield and is safe for the environment. But it also gives them an unfair advantage over the rest of us because they’re not paying the technology fees that American farmers must pay. They’re stealing intellectual property from the scientists and researchers who created it in the first place.
Any country that wants to become a full participant in the global marketplace must have a functioning system that enforces the protection of intellectual property rights--and if it doesn’t have one, it must be compelled to create one.
China tops everybody’s wish list, because its market is so big and it currently steals so much. The government in Beijing has embraced biotechnology--but in a classic bit of protectionism, it has not approved any new transgenic crops since 2000. Many experts believe Beijing is trying to nurture its own embryonic biotech industry by sheltering it from outside competition.
“China is trying to make major investments in biotechnology research,” says Julia Moore of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in a recent issue of Nature. “But it is also taking advantage of biotechnology concerns in Europe and elsewhere to limit its import of the technology.”
If China were to begin enforcing intellectual property rights protections, it would find that it has much to gain from cooperating with scientists and researchers in other countries. Chinese farmers who grow bt cotton, currently China’s biggest gene-altered crop, understand the enormous advantages of increased yield, decreased production costs, and the environmental friendliness of the seed. They’re experiencing it firsthand.
The rest of the world also would benefit from China’s know-how, and China’s biotech industry would receive substantial foreign investment.
But first, they’ve got to agree to leave the saltshakers on the dinner table.
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Winston Churchill once attended a fancy dinner, where he was told that one of the guests had slipped a silver saltshaker into his pocket. Churchill then took the matching peppershaker and put it in his own pocket. At the conclusion of dinner, he sat down next to the thief and said, “Oh dear, we were seen. Perhaps we had both better put them back.”
