Who owns the knowledge economy?

Richard Clayton at FIPR tells me that an interesting website, The Corner House has just published a briefing paper from Peter Drahos and John Braitwaite,

Who Owns the Knowledge Economy?
Political Organising Behind TRIPS.

This is a substantial edited extract from their excellent book, Information Feudalism, published by Earthscan in 2002 and is well worth a read if you're interested in the international power dynamics underlying developments in intellectual property law. The Corner House summary of the paper follows:

"TRIPS -- the World Trade Organisation's agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights -- was the most important agreement on intellectual property of the 20th century. It revolutionised the way that property rights in information were defined and enforced. TRIPS effectively globalises the set of intellectual property principles it contains, because most countries are members of, or are seeking membership of, the World Trade Organisation that administers TRIPS.

When TRIPS was signed by more than one hundred government ministers in April 1994, the United States, the European Community and Japan had the world's dominant software, pharmaceutical, chemical and entertainment industries between them and the world's most important trade marks. The rest of the world had nothing much to gain by agreeing to terms of trade for intellectual property that offered these countries so much protection. Why did states sign up to TRIPS?

They did so because of a failure of democratic processes, both nationally and internationally. This enabled a small group of men within the United States to capture the US trade-agenda-setting process; then, in partnership with European and Japanese multinationals, to draft intellectual property principles that became the blueprint for TRIPS. The resistance of other countries was crushed through US trade power.

This briefing paper explores the background to TRIPS and the corporate political organising that orchestrated and paved the way for the agreement."