By Thrishni Subramoney

JOHANNESBURG--Taking a serious look at intellectual property rights might just be one of the ‘healthiest’ moves the developing world makes. The opening speakers at the Creative Commons conference underway in Johannesburg made a strong case for policy makers to pay more attention to links between improving quality of life and the quest for making knowledge more accessible.Tenu Avafia, a lawyer with the Trade Law Centre of Southern Africa, said: “A stronger link needs to be made between copyright and human rights.” Avafia pointed out that selling the fruits of medical and scientific research at a premium, hampered the delivery of health care in the developing world. “At the end of the day, we’re dealing with human beings, and that human component should be paramount.”He said the developing world needed to be vigilant to ensure that Trade Related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) weren’t further tightened, as urged by the United States. The US wants intellectualproperty rights to be strengthened under the banner of ‘TRIPS plus’.
Also speaking at the morning session, the ‘father’ of Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig and Consumer Project on Technology advocate, James Love, painted a vivid picture of how intellectual property rights were an indicator of how the ethics of the world had changed.“There is something deeply unethical about what the United States is doing with ‘TRIPS plus’. It’s just as bad as urging piracy, because either move shifts the balance (between having creators see the benefits of their work and having their work benefit the public),” Lessig said.Lessig accused policy makers of being intuitively against ideas such as the commons, “They regard the idea of making knowledge freely available as 'evil' because the idea of putting a price on ideas is attractive to the few who can afford to pay the costs. Costly protects the powerful,” he warned.Love said the very idea of regarding knowledge in marketable terms was flawed. “There’s something wrong with a global society that’s so good at moving private goods and so bad at providing public wealth.”Love advocated a new system under which medicine patents were re-worked so that pharmaceutical companies held patent rights to a drug only until it hit the shelves. Thereafter they would benefit from an “innovation prize fund” based on incremental health care benefits. This means that the company would benefit from the amount of money that the government saves on health care – savings generated by using generic drugs.Lessig also hit out at the reasons given by Western governments for not allowing developing countries free access to their research and educational resources. He condemned arguments put forward by academics and policy makers who said that having to pay for knowledge would encourage developing countries to come up with their own innovations.“If what they are saying is true, then every hundred years, we should have to burn thousands of books, so that people can ‘work’ to re-discover the things that Newton did,” Lessig said.