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As ever more ideas and everyday activities
-- from swinging a swing to traditional farming techniques
-- are identified and commodified as intellectual property,
struggles over the control of information are destined to
become crucial battlegrounds in the 21st century. One telling
example is the three-year courtroom battle a coalition of
activists fought to bring cheap versions of desperately
needed AIDS drugs to South Africa -- in which time over
1 million people died of AIDS in that country alone.
Uncovering the story of how a small coterie
of multinational corporations came to write the charter
for a new global information order, Information Feudalism
demonstrates why ordinary citizens should be concerned
about the world of intellectual property rights, patent
regimes, and antitrust laws. The authors trace the rise
of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual
Property Rights (TRIPS), the little-known provision that
now governs intellectual property disputes across the globe,
through inside accounts of the essentially back-room deals
that gave birth to it. Along the way, the book also provides
a mini-history of piracy -- both the high-seas and intellectual
varieties -- as well as close descriptions of the political
involvements of entities like Pfizer, IBM, and Hollywood.
Information Feudalism is both a powerful history
of the closing off of the world's intellectual commons,
and an insistent call to establish democratic property rights.
Peter Drahos is a professor at the Research
School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University.
He is the author of A Philosophy of Intellectual Property
and, with John Braithwaite, Global Business Regulation.
John Braithwaite is a business regulatory
scholar who is an Australian Research Council Federation
Fellow at the Australian National University. His major
works include Corporate Crime
in the Pharmaceutical Industry
and Corporations, Crime and Accountability
(with B. Fisse).
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