[Commons-Law] TRIPS, a mistake

[Monica Narula]

 From Ian Brown's blog (one of the main designers of the TRIPS):


Lehman: TRIPS was a mistake
http://dooooooom.blogspot.com/2006/03/lehman-trips-was-mistake.html

I'm attending a great meeting in Brussels on "The Politics and  
Ideology of
Intellectual Property" [1]. We just had quite a newsflash from Bruce  
Lehman,
President Clinton's head of intellectual property policy who was largely
responsible for the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual
Property Rights (TRIPS).

Lehman now believes TRIPS has been a failure for the United States,  
because
the WTO agreement in which it is included opened US markets to overseas
manufactured goods and destroyed the US manufacturing industry. He  
feels that
the US has kept its part of the TRIPS bargain, but that with 90%  
piracy in
China, higher-end developing nations have not. In retrospect, he  
feels the US
should instead have introduced labour and environmental standards  
into the
WTO agreement so that jobs would not be lost in the US manufacturing  
sector
to countries with few environmental standards and weak unions.

How exhilirating that Mr Lehman agrees with civil society IP experts  
across
the developed and developing world!


[1] http://www.tacd.org/docs/?id=286
[2] http://www.edri.org/


Monica Narula
Raqs Media Collective
Sarai-CSDS
29 Rajpur Road
Delhi 110054
www.raqsmediacollective.net
www.sarai.net