<nettime> TRIPS was a mistake

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.org>]

[It's amazing to see that the treaty which many identify as the corner stone 
of "information feudalism" (Peter Drahos) is judged as a failure by one of 
it's main designers. From Ian Brown's blog, via the always excellent EDRI 
newsletter [2]. Felix]


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/






----http://felix.openflows.org------------------------------ out now:
*|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 
*|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 



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