The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is the most important organization that most people have never heard of. Though it is connected to the United Nations, it serves a legitimate purpose: It protects intellectual property, for both moral and practical reasons.
Moral, because people own their ideas and the products those ideas create just as surely as they own real property that they have acquired in a legitimate transaction.
Practical, because relaxing protections will erode the incentive to create. If ideas can be stolen from those who generate them, then there will be fewer ideas. Tech companies, drug makers, any industry whose innovations advance economies and living standards in both developed and developing nations need to have the expectation that they will be fully compensated for their work.
But WIPO, like all political institutions, is subject to political pressure. That fact hasn’t been overlooked by a collection of U.S. and European Union “consumer groups” that is trying to strong arm WIPO into weakening intellectual property standards.
IP protections that are too strong, say groups such as the Consumer Project on Technology, have harmful social and economic consequences. Instead of protecting the owners of copyrights, patents and trademarks, these groups want WIPO to place more of its focus on the interests and needs of developing countries.
What they really want to do is make the world safe for idea pirates.
Argentina and Brazil are two nations that are actively pushing this “development agenda.” But is either of those countries, given their less-than-stellar economic performances of the last four decades, in a position to lecture anyone about anything?
It should be no surprise that the anti-capitalists and anti-globalists are at work here. They want the world’s brightest minds working for the collective rather than private interests. And they very well may succeed. But the world – especially the developing nations – won’t be any better off. In fact, when the incentives to innovate are taken away, it just might be worse.