Paradigm shift in the global IP regime: The agency of academics (original) (raw)

2013, Review of International Political Economy

The global intellectual property (IP) regime is in the midst of a paradigm shift in favor of greater access to protected work. Current explanations of this paradigm shift emphasize the agency of transnational advocacy networks, but ignore the role of academics. Scholars interested by global IP politics have failed to engage in reflexive thinking. Building on the results from a survey of 1,679 IP experts, this article argues that a community of academics successfully broke the policy monopoly of practitioners over IP expertise. They instilled some skepticism concerning the social and economic impacts of IP among their students as well as in the broader community of IP experts. They also provided expert knowledge that was widely amplified by NGOs and some intergovernmental organizations, acting as echo chambers to reach national decision makers. By making these claims, this article illustrates how epistemic communities actively collaborate with other transnational networks rather than competing with them, and how they can promote a paradigm change by generating rather than reducing uncertainty. Paradigm Shift in the Global IP Regime: The Agency of Academics The global intellectual property (IP) regime is currently in the midst of a paradigm shift. Until the early 2000s, the prevailing discourse was promoting the worldwide harmonization of IP rights, modeled on high American and European standards of protection. According to this one-size-fits-all discourse, the same set of rules should be applicable for every field of innovation, irrespective of their social, environmental, or cultural value, and in every nation, irrespective of their level of economic development. Under this paradigm, each new multilateral IP agreements raised the level of protection in developing countries and limited further the authorized exceptions, including the 1991 International Convention of for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants, the 1994 Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), and the 1996 Copyright Treaty of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). As late as 2003, the Director General of the WIPO wrote that IP laws are "an essential component of economic strategy regardless of whether the country is developed or developing" (Idris 2003, 133). A decade later, to the dismay of several stakeholders, this continuous extension of IP protection through multilateral negotiations has stopped. The hot topics of the late 1990s, such as the patentability of higher life forms, the extension of copyright term to 75 years, or