From the Q&A period of a speech by Noam Chomsky at
Washington State University on April 22, 2005
Questioner:
“IP” or
Intellectual Properties. Do you feel that they are an integral component
to personal freedoms or a detriment? And what place does Intellectual
Property have in public and academic settings?
Chomsky:
That’s a very interesting question. It has an
interesting history. The World Trade Organization, the Uruguay round that
set up the World Trade Organization imposed, it’s called a “free trade
agreement”. It’s in fact a highly protectionist agreement. The US
is strongly opposed to free trade, just as business leaders are, just as
they’re opposed to a market economy. A crucial part of the Uruguay round, WTO,
NAFTA, and the rest of them, is very strong (what are called) intellectual
property rights. What it actually means is rights that guarantee monopoly
pricing power to private tyrannies.
So take, say, a drug corporation. Most of the
serious research and development, the hard part of it, is funded by the public. In fact most of the economy comes out of public expenditures through the
state system, which is the source of most innovation and development. I
mean computers, the Internet. Just go through the range, it’s all coming
out of the state system primarily. There is research and development in
the corporate system, some, but it’s mostly at the marketing end. And the
same is true of drugs.
Once the corporations gain the benefit of the public
paying the costs and taking the risks, they want to monopolize the profit.
And the intellectual property rights, they’re not for small inventors. In fact the people doing the work in the corporations, they don’t get
anything out of it, like a dollar if they invent something. It’s the
corporate tyrannies that are making the profits, and they want to guarantee
them.
The World Trade Organization proposed new, enhanced
intellectual property rights, patent rights, which means monopoly pricing rights, far beyond anything
that existed in the past. In fact they are not only designed to maximize monopoly
pricing, and profit, but also to prevent development.
That’s rather crucial. WTO rules introduced product patents. It used
to be you could patent a process, but not the product, which means if some
smart guy could figure out a better way of doing it, he could do it. They
wanted to block that. It’s important to block development and progress, in
order to ensure monopoly rights. So they now have product patents.
Well if you take a look at, say, US history. Suppose the colonies after independence had been forced to accept that
regime. Do you know what we’d be doing now? Well first of all
there’d be very few of us here. But those of us who would be here would
be pursuing our comparative advantage and exporting fish and fur. That’s
what economists tell you is right. Pursue your comparative advantage. That was our comparative advantage. We certainly wouldn’t have had
a textile industry. British textiles were way cheaper and better.
Actually British textiles were cheaper and better because Britain had
crushed Irish and Indian superior textile manufacturers and stolen their
techniques. So they were now the preeminent textile manufacturer, by
force of course.
The US would never have had a textile industry. It grew up around Massachusetts, but the only way it could develop was
extremely high tariffs which protected unviable US industries. So the
textile industry developed, and that has a spin off into other industries. And, so it continues.
The US would never have had a steel industry. Again same reason. British steel was way superior. One of the
reasons is because they were stealing Indian techniques. British
engineers were going to India to learn about steel-making well into the 19th
century. Britain ran the country by force, so they could take what they
knew. And they develop a steel industry. And the US imposed
extremely high tariffs, also massive government involvement, through the
military system as usual. And the US developed a steel industry. And so it continues. Right up to the present.
Furthermore that’s true of every single developed
society. That’s one of the best known truths of economic history. The only countries that developed are the ones that pursued these
techniques. The ones that weren’t able… There were countries that
were forced to adopt “free trade” and “liberalization”: the colonies, and they
got destroyed. And the divide between the first and the third world is
really since the 18th century. It wasn’t very much in the 18th century,
and it’s very sharply along these lines.
Well, that’s what the intellectual property rights are
for. In fact there’s a name for it in economic history. Friedrich
List, famous German political economist in the 19th century, who was actually
borrowing from Andrew Hamilton, called it “kicking away the ladder”. First you use state power and violence to develop, then you kick away
those procedures so that other people can’t do it.
Intellectual property rights has very little to do
with individual initiative. I mean, Einstein didn’t have any intellectual
property rights on relativity theory. Science and innovation are carried out by
people that are interested in it. That’s the way science works. There’s an effort in very recent years to commercialize it, like they
commercialize everything else. So you don’t do it because it’s exciting
and challenging, and you want to find out something new, and you want the world
to benefit from it.
You do it because maybe you can make some money out of
it. I mean that’s a… you can make your own judgment about the moral
value. I think it’s extremely cheapening, but, also destructive of
initiative and development.
And the profits don’t go back to individual inventors. It’s a very well studied topic. Take one that’s really well
studied, MIT’s involved: computer controlled machine tools, a very fundamental
component of the economy. Well, there’s a very good study of this by
David Nobel, a leading political economist. What he pointed out and
discovered is the techniques were invented by some small guy, you know working
in his garage somewhere in, I think, Michigan. Actually when the MIT
mechanical engineering department learned about it, they picked them up and
they developed them and extended them and so on. And then the
corporations came in and picked them up from them, and finally it became a core
part of US industry. Well, what happened to the guy who invented it?
He’s still probably working in his garage in Michigan, or wherever it is. And that’s very typical.
I just don’t think it has much to do with innovation
or independence. It has to do with protecting major concentrations of
power, which mostly got their power as a public gift, and making sure that they
can maintain and expand their power. And these are highly protectionist devices
and I don’t think… You really have to ram them down people’s throats.
They don’t make any economic sense or any other sense.
Questioner:
…So what
role though do you think they should play in academic and public institutions?
Chomsky:
Well I don’t think they should play any role. (Applause) But, since 1981 there
was an amendment which gave universities the right to patent inventions that
came out of their own research. Actually that’s kind of a gag. I
mean nothing comes out of the university’s own research. It comes out of
public funding. That’s how the university can function. That’s how their
research projects work. The whole thing is set up to socialize cost and risk to
the general public, and then within that context, yeah in your biology lab you
can invent something. But I don’t think
universities should patent it. They should be working for the public
good. (Applause) And that means
it should be available to the public.
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