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Digital Divide or Unequal Exchange? How the Northern Intellectual Property Rights Regime Threatens the South

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2019

Colin Darch
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Extract

This conference of law librarians is convened around the theme of “New Rights — New Laws.” I want to argue that, with regard to information, while there are new laws aplenty, there are in fact no new rights. Worse, we are presently witnessing a steady erosion of even the existing public rights of access to and use of information content, whether of a legal nature or not. In fact, there is mounting evidence that the idea of the public domain itself is under serious attack both as a concept and as a collection of practices. The global privatization of cultural and intellectual content in ways unimaginable only a few decades ago is actively threatening the established structures of scholarly communication, to the increasing disadvantage of the less-developed South. Intellectual property (IP) rights are being extended into new areas, as the patent system, for example, expands into biotechnology, agriculture and medicine, while copyright, patent and trade secret protection is claimed even for computer software, mathematical algorithms, and business methods. IP protection is under discussion for indigenous knowledge, and not necessarily for altruistic reasons. And as the useful shelf life of such content shortens, the protection afforded to it lengthens disproportionately in a disturbing pattern that nearly always favors rights holders and their claims above even the most rudimentary forms of public good.

Type
Proceedings
Information
International Journal of Legal Information , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , Summer 2004 , pp. 488 - 501
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 by the International Association of Law Libraries. 

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References

1 The attack is increasingly brutal, frontal and direct. In recent litigation in the United States about the Linux computer operating system, for instance, it has been argued that the General Public License (GPL) is invalid because it is pre-empted by copyright law. In other words, a court is being asked to rule that a rights holder cannot waive his or her IP rights even if he or she wants to. See Matthew Broersma, “SCO plans court attack on Linux GPL,” ZDNet, 15 August 2003, available at http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-5064337.html, [16 September 2003]. Another example might be limits imposed on inter-library loan activity by some database licenses.Google Scholar

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37 For example, open source software, or the Open Archive Initiative for delivering preprints of scientific articles.Google Scholar