The Institute for Trade, Standards, and Sustainable Development (ITSSD) has published Rediscovering the Value of Intellectual Property Rights: How Brazil’s Recognition and Protection of Foreign IPRs Can Stimulate Domestic Innovation and Generate Economic Growth, by Lawrence Kogan.

Summary: This article documents how the Brazilian government, assisted by ideological activists, academics and politicians, has brazenly led a bloc of emerging and less developed economies to craft a highly controversial anti-intellectual property right (IPR) legal framework that will undermine exclusive private property rights and free enterprise globally. The article provides evidence showing why Brazil should pursue 'bottom-up' IP-based innovation rather than 'top-down' IP opportunism to stimulate domestic innovation and generate economic growth.

The above link is to the Executive Summary. The full paper is published in the International Journal of Economic Development.

The press release adds:

While the government of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva works diligently to appear as a political moderate and a dependable market-friendly force within a highly volatile and blatantly populist region of the world, international business, trade and regulatory expert Lawrence A. Kogan of the ITSSD reports how Brazil, under Mr. Lula’s leadership, is actually working to undermine exclusive private property rights and free enterprise globally.

In a new article appearing in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Economic Development (IJED), Mr. Kogan documents how the Brazilian government, assisted by ideological activists, academics and politicians, has brazenly led a bloc of emerging and less developed economies to craft a highly controversial anti-intellectual property right (IPR) legal framework. According to the article, Brazil is believed to be promoting this new international paradigm in order to divert attention away from its weak national education and innovation systems, to gain negotiating leverage at the now-stalled WTO Doha round trade talks, and to project itself politically as the international champion of a development agenda that calls for a massive redistribution of global wealth and knowledge (technology transfer) at or below concession rate prices.

Rather than embrace what clearly amounts to a national and global policy of (IP) opportunism, which aims to ensure open source, universal access to (life sciences and information technology) knowledge for all at the expense of exclusive, privately-owned IP rights, the article explains why Brazil should instead adopt a proven ‘bottom-up’ policy of domestic market-based discovery and innovation premised on strong individual private property right recognition and protection.

posted by James DeLong @ 7:33 AM | International

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