No Strings Attached

As governments in the developing world seek to manage the inevitable globalization of their economies, it’s important to pick policies that promote the best practices, not the worst. Concepts like open collaboration and technology reciprocity, as embodied in the open source software (OSS) movement, are among the best promises of globalization. Conversely, the concept of knowledge as property is among globalization’s worst threats.

“IPR is a vehicle for economic inequality — self-serving for the developed countries, but deadly for the developing ones.”

Developing countries are told by global bodies like the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) that if they treat knowledge as property and protect Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), then they can begin to compete effectively in the global knowledge market. They will start to capture their share of the boundless wealth of the new economy. Unfortunately, the egos of many of the best and brightest policy makers and engineers in developing countries are flattered by this promise and they easily succumb to a “David and Goliath” illusion. But make no mistake, promotion of IPR is nothing more than a self-serving strategy used to protect the relative advantages of developed countries in today’s technology markets.

Promoting Inequality

IPR is a vehicle for economic inequality — self-serving for the developed countries, but deadly for the developing ones. For example, under emergency circumstances like the AIDS pandemic, drug companies of Brazil, South Africa and India are permitted to copy Western patented medicines for use within their own countries. While these developing countries have the manufacturing ability to produce modern medicines, they don’t have the deep R&D facilities needed to invent their own advanced drugs. Ironically, acceding to the demands of WIPO enables a small fraction of developing countries to provide certain medicines, like cheap AIDS generics, for their own citizens but at the same time prevents them from selling these medicines to citizens of other poor countries that don’t have the industrial capability to produce their own drugs.

Protecting Self-Interest

In the business of international trade, the push to protect IPR becomes a principal way to constrain trade for the benefit of developed countries, the wealthy holders of the lion’s share of IP, whether in drug manufacturing or computer software.

IPR protection overwhelmingly favors the large-scale generators of IP. Late comers and small players have no chance to compete with the slick IPR regimes of the developed countries. The developing countries, as piracy is battled and weakened, are locked into being perpetual consumers of the knowledge guilds of the advanced countries. Knowledge created and hoarded by the developed countries is then rented to the developing countries at prices they can ill afford. The greatest tragedy is that paying the knowledge rent can wipe out the developing country’s resources to build their own infrastructure and capabilities.

Technology Reciprocity

Developing countries must awaken to the reality that technology collaboration with enforced reciprocity is the only weapon they have to stem the pernicious cycle of knowledge taxation and rental. Effective collaboration in fields like drug manufacturing may be difficult, perhaps impossible, to achieve without dismantling the current IPR regime. But in software, fortunately, licenses like GPLv2 and potentially its stronger successor, GPLv3, can help developing countries escape, one step at a time, the software incarnation of digital colonialism. In licensing, as well as in methods and practices, OSS offers a compelling platform for building self-reliant and high-quality solutions for automation in developing countries.

Participating as Equals

Policies in developing countries that don’t mandate openness and reciprocity in growing their knowledge economies are doomed to failure. There is no other way to force the developed countries to share their knowledge and expertise fairly. The alternative is a knowledge franchise system where the developing countries rent high-cost products and services while being blocked from independence and self-sufficiency. But OSS, along with a larger framework for sharing knowledge collaboratively, can be a weapon of mass construction for developing countries if done right. The real reason that developing countries should adopt a pro-OSS and pro-open knowledge policy is that they must!