The Corporate Interests Behind IP Law

 I enjoyed the intellectual property reading Mike assigned us all so much that I couldn’t help but post one last reflection. At first, what struck me most about the reading was how pervasive the issue is. Although I’m no stranger to the topic, it’s often easy for me to forget (with my attention usually so focused on media studies) that IP battles are a huge problem for the medical and pharmaceutical world.

The article's discussion regarding the availability of drugs due to pharmaceutical patents reminded me, strangely enough, of another frontier in the medical world dealing with IP: genetics. The peculiarity of this particular area is that 20% of human genes are already patentedby medical researchers and pharmaceutical companies. Think of it, 20% of you is patented by someone else who is not you. The strangeness of this only plays out further when you think about cases like the immortal (cancerous) cell line (the HeLa cell line) pulled from Henrietta Lacks. The HeLa cells helped researchers develop a vaccine for polio, and continue to aid other research around AIDs, cancer, environmental poisoning, gene mapping – everything. However, the supreme court ruled that Henrietta's “discarded” cells could not be considered her, or her family's, property: an awful irony considering the poverty that the Lacks family continues to struggle with.

All this being said, what ended up sticking with me most from this article was its description of a legal system that, although perhaps byzantine and confused, is still uncorrupted or unbiased by prevailing markets. Although the article references the complex historical nature of IP law, it attributes the backwardness of these laws to the bumbling or “haphazard” efforts of its builders. (136) Despite the article's call for “socially relevant” critiques of IP law that take into consideration its complex foundations, it fails to acknowledge the strong influence of certain copyright lobbies on these decisions. (138)

Here I will recommend Rip: A Remix Manifesto to everyone. The documentary certainly does a better job at summarizing the corporate interests behind IP law than I can.

The point is, we need to acknowledge that, at least in part, the legal system described in the article is also a system that rewards higher paying lobbies; the greater access to funds, the more time and energy devoted to a cause, the more likely there is to be a positive outcome for that lobby.