In the New Yorker, James Surowiecki has a very smart analysis of America's approach to intellectual property laws in international trade deals:
Our recent free-trade agreement with South Korea is a good example. Most of the deal is concerned with lowering tariffs, opening markets to competition, and the like, but an important chunk has nothing to do with free trade at all. Instead, it requires South Korea to rewrite its rules on intellectual property, or I.P.—the rules that deal with patents, copyright, and so on. South Korea will now have to adopt the U.S. and E.U. definition of copyright—extending it to seventy years after the death of the author. South Korea will also have to change its rules on patents, and may have to change its national-health-care policy of reimbursing patients only for certain drugs. All these changes will give current patent and copyright holders stronger protection for longer. Recent free-trade agreements with Peru and Colombia insisted on much the same terms. And CAFTA—a free-trade agreement with countries in Central America and the Caribbean—included not just longer copyright and trademark protection but also a dramatic revision in those countries' patent policies.[...]
The U.S., in its negotiations, insists on a one-size-fits-all approach: stronger rules are better. But accepting a diverse range of I.P. rules makes more sense, especially in light of the different economic challenges that developing and developed countries face. Lerner's study found that the benefits of stronger patent laws were reduced in less developed countries. And developing countries, being poorer, obviously have more to gain from shorter patent terms for foreign innovations, since that facilitates the spread of new technology and the diffusion of ideas. Tellingly, this is the approach the U.S. takes when it comes to labor standards, arguing that we shouldn't impose developed-country standards on developing countries. But in the case of intellectual property the government's position is exactly the opposite. The only difference, it seems, is whose interests are at stake.
It's worth driving in how exact the analogy is: Labor and corporations both argue that insufficient attention to their particular regulatory protections -- in Labor's case, wage and work standards, in the corporate example, IP laws -- will lead to disastrous consequences. Labor warns of the middle class's demise, corporations warn of innovation's end. Neither strikes me as particularly likely in full, but both will suffer adverse effects from a deregulated global sphere. It's telling, then, that Labor's concerns are almost entirely ignored, while the American government exerts great energy in favor of corporate protections. As Krugman recently put it in a column on inequality, "The government can tilt the balance of power between workers and bosses in many ways—and at every juncture this government has favored the bosses.” There's no market-based, independent reason to demand wide application of our patent laws and not our labor standards. It's a choice, and a revealing one.
