[TA] | Global talk | Covid-19 demonstrates how our approach to IP threatens health, safety, and livelihoods.
Tuesday 26 | 8:00 a.m.
Miriam Brett
Common Wealth Think Tank & The Democracy Collaborative
While intended to stimulate innovation, today’s approach to IP promotes the accumulation and protection of assets by a narrow set of multinational companies, while failing to equitably develop and distribute products and services, adequately compensate workers and taxpayers, or maximize innovation. We need a new approach that recognizes how central these systems are to building a more equitable, sustainable, and democratic economy. Common Wealth and The Democracy Collaborative set out policies rooted in democratic public ownership:
- Grow public investment in socially and environmentally beneficial R&D:
- Increasing public R&D investment to at least 2% of GDP over the next 10 years;
- Reforming the tax system to improve investment;
- Establishing public investment banks as part of an industrial strategy.
- Grow the public stake in creations of the mind:
- Creation of IP Commons bodies and require that IP generated from publicly funded R&D be put into the commons;
- Public venture capital funds to help direct innovation in key industries.
- Global tech transfer and reparations
- Transferring certain IP rights, removing IP restrictions on certain critical innovations, and overhauling pro-corporate, pro-enclosure IP rules that predominate trade systems e.g., mandatory contributions to WHO Covid-19 mRNA Tech Transfer Hub and the Medicines Patent Pool of IP.
- Ensure IP serves the common good:
- Fair tax principles and labor practices: ending tax avoidance schemes and requiring that IP be revoked from or denied to private corporations due to labor or public good abuses be put into the commons;
- Social and environmental returns: linking IP protections to certain public good standards (e.g., equitable access to medicines);
- Regaining control of investment, for instance, by establishing regulations that mandate firms reinvest a certain share of profits in R&D.
- Challenge corporate power
- Renegotiate trade deals that overly restrict the free flow of information and technology
- Create public sector enterprises to diversify the landscape in concentrated, powerful industries like pharmaceuticals.