Against Intellectual Monopoly
Against Intellectual Monopoly

Author: Michele Boldrin

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-01-25

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 9780521127264

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"Intellectual property" - patents and copyrights - have become controversial. We witness teenagers being sued for "pirating" music - and we observe AIDS patients in Africa dying due to lack of ability to pay for drugs that are high priced to satisfy patent holders. Are patents and copyrights essential to thriving creation and innovation - do we need them so that we all may enjoy fine music and good health? Across time and space the resounding answer is: No. So-called intellectual property is in fact an "intellectual monopoly" that hinders rather than helps the competitive free market regime that has delivered wealth and innovation to our doorsteps. This book has broad coverage of both copyrights and patents and is designed for a general audience, focusing on simple examples. The authors conclude that the only sensible policy to follow is to eliminate the patents and copyright systems as they currently exist.

Against Intellectual Monopoly
Against Intellectual Monopoly

Author: Michele Boldrin

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2008-07-07

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9780521879286

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"Intellectual property" - patents and copyrights - have become controversial. We witness teenagers being sued for "pirating" music - and we observe AIDS patients in Africa dying due to lack of ability to pay for drugs that are high priced to satisfy patent holders. Are patents and copyrights essential to thriving creation and innovation - do we need them so that we all may enjoy fine music and good health? Across time and space the resounding answer is: No. So-called intellectual property is in fact an "intellectual monopoly" that hinders rather than helps the competitive free market regime that has delivered wealth and innovation to our doorsteps. This book has broad coverage of both copyrights and patents and is designed for a general audience, focusing on simple examples. The authors conclude that the only sensible policy to follow is to eliminate the patents and copyright systems as they currently exist.

Against the Intellectual Monopoly
Against the Intellectual Monopoly

Author: Michele Boldrin

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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Los autores de la obra, dos economistas de primera fila, ofrecen en su página web - y además gratuitamente, lo que muestra la coherencia con sus ideas- una nueva versión del libro, en el que abogan, por razones de eficiencia económica, por la completa y total abolición de los derechos de propiedad intelectual e industrial, salvo el de marca y otros de carácter identificativo de bienes y servicios. Como ellos mismos dicen, intentan demostrar mediante teoría y ejemplos que el monopolio intelectual no es necesario para la innovación y que lo único que está haciendo es dificultar el crecimiento, la prosperidad y la libertad.

Capitalism, Power and Innovation
Capitalism, Power and Innovation

Author: Cecilia Rikap

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-03-29

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1000368750

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In contemporary global capitalism, the most powerful corporations are innovation or intellectual monopolies. The book’s unique perspective focuses on how private ownership and control of knowledge and data have become a major source of rent and power. The author explains how at the one pole, these corporations concentrate income, property and power in the United States, China, and in a handful of intellectual monopolies, particularly from digital and pharmaceutical industries, while at the other pole developing countries are left further behind. The book includes detailed empirical mappings of how intellectual monopolies develop and transform knowledge from universities and open-source collaborations into intangible assets. The result is a strategy that combines undermining the commons through privatization with harvesting from the same commons. The book ends with provoking reflections to tilt the scale against intellectual monopoly capitalism and arguing that desired changes require democratic mobilization of workers and citizens at large. This book represents one of the first attempts to capture the contours of an emerging new era where old perspectives lead us astray, and the old policy toolbox is hopelessly inadequate. This is true for the idea that the best, or only, way to promote innovation is to transform knowledge into private property. It is also true for anti-trust policies focusing exclusively on consumer prices. The formation of global infrastructures that lead to natural monopolies calls for public rather than private ownership. Scholars and professionals from the social sciences and humanities (in particular economics, sociology, political science, geography, educational science and science and technology studies) will enjoy a clear and all-embracing depiction of innovation dynamics in contemporary capitalism, with a particular focus on asymmetries between actors, regions and topics. In fact, its topical issue broadens the book’s scope to those curious about how innovation networks shape our world.

Medical Monopoly
Medical Monopoly

Author: Joseph M. Gabriel

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2014-10-24

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 022610821X

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During most of the nineteenth century, physicians and pharmacists alike considered medical patenting and the use of trademarks by drug manufacturers unethical forms of monopoly; physicians who prescribed patented drugs could be, and were, ostracized from the medical community. In the decades following the Civil War, however, complex changes in patent and trademark law intersected with the changing sensibilities of both physicians and pharmacists to make intellectual property rights in drug manufacturing scientifically and ethically legitimate. By World War I, patented and trademarked drugs had become essential to the practice of good medicine, aiding in the rise of the American pharmaceutical industry and forever altering the course of medicine. Drawing on a wealth of previously unused archival material, Medical Monopoly combines legal, medical, and business history to offer a sweeping new interpretation of the origins of the complex and often troubling relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and medical practice today. Joseph M. Gabriel provides the first detailed history of patent and trademark law as it relates to the nineteenth-century pharmaceutical industry as well as a unique interpretation of medical ethics, therapeutic reform, and the efforts to regulate the market in pharmaceuticals before World War I. His book will be of interest not only to historians of medicine and science and intellectual property scholars but also to anyone following contemporary debates about the pharmaceutical industry, the patenting of scientific discoveries, and the role of advertising in the marketplace.

Owning the Sun
Owning the Sun

Author: Alexander Zaitchik

Publisher: Catapult

Published: 2023-03-28

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 164009590X

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For readers of Bad Blood and Empire of Pain, an authoritative look at monopoly medicine from the dawn of patents through the race for COVID-19 vaccines and how the privatization of public science has prioritized profits over people Owning the Sun tells the story of one of the most contentious fights in human history: the legal right to produce lifesaving medicines. Medical science began as a discipline geared toward the betterment of all human life, but the merging of research with intellectual property and the rise of the pharmaceutical industry warped and eventually undermined its ethical foundations. Since World War II, federally funded research has facilitated most major medical breakthroughs, yet these drugs are often wholly controlled by price-gouging corporations with growing international ambitions. Why does the U.S. government fund the development of medical science in the name of the public only to relinquish exclusive rights to drug companies, and how does such a system impoverish us, weaken our responses to crises, and, as in the cases of AIDS and COVID-19, put the world at risk? Outlining how generations of public health and science advocates have attempted to hold the line against Big Pharma and their allies in government, Alexander Zaitchik’s first-of-its-kind history documents the rise of privatized medicine in the United States and its subsequent globalization. From the controversial arrival of patent-wielding German drug firms in the late nineteenth century to present-day coordination between industry and philanthropic organizations—including the influential Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—that stymie international efforts to vaccinate the world against COVID-19, Owning the Sun tells one of the most important and least understood histories of our time.

The Digital Innovation Race
The Digital Innovation Race

Author: Cecilia Rikap

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-12-09

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 3030894436

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This book develops new theoretical perspectives on the economics and politics of innovation and knowledge in order to capture new trends in modern capitalism. It shows how giant corporations establish themselves as intellectual monopolies and how each of them builds and controls its own corporate innovation system. It presents an analysis of a new form of production where Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, and their counterparts in China, extract value and appropriate intellectual rents through privileged access to AI algorithms trained by data from organizations and individuals all around the world. These companies’ specific form of production and rent-seeking takes place at the global level and challenges national governments trying to regulate intellectual monopolies and attempting to build stronger national innovation systems. It is within this context that the authors provide new insights on the complex interplay between corporate and national innovation systems by looking at the US-China conflict, understood as a struggle for global technological supremacy. The book ends with alternative scenarios of global governance and advances policy recommendations as well as calls for social activism. This book will be of interest to students, academics and practitioners (both from national states and international organizations) and professionals working on innovation, digital capitalism and related topics.

Goliath
Goliath

Author: Matt Stoller

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Published: 2020-10-06

Total Pages: 608

ISBN-13: 1501182897

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“Every thinking American must read” (The Washington Book Review) this startling and “insightful” (The New York Times) look at how concentrated financial power and consumerism has transformed American politics, and business. Going back to our country’s founding, Americans once had a coherent and clear understanding of political tyranny, one crafted by Thomas Jefferson and updated for the industrial age by Louis Brandeis. A concentration of power—whether by government or banks—was understood as autocratic and dangerous to individual liberty and democracy. In the 1930s, people observed that the Great Depression was caused by financial concentration in the hands of a few whose misuse of their power induced a financial collapse. They drew on this tradition to craft the New Deal. In Goliath, Matt Stoller explains how authoritarianism and populism have returned to American politics for the first time in eighty years, as the outcome of the 2016 election shook our faith in democratic institutions. It has brought to the fore dangerous forces that many modern Americans never even knew existed. Today’s bitter recriminations and panic represent more than just fear of the future, they reflect a basic confusion about what is happening and the historical backstory that brought us to this moment. The true effects of populism, a shrinking middle class, and concentrated financial wealth are only just beginning to manifest themselves under the current administrations. The lessons of Stoller’s study will only grow more relevant as time passes. “An engaging call to arms,” (Kirkus Reviews) Stoller illustrates here in rich detail how we arrived at this tenuous moment, and the steps we must take to create a new democracy.

The Global Politics of Pharmaceutical Monopoly Power
The Global Politics of Pharmaceutical Monopoly Power

Author: Ellen F. M. 't Hoen

Publisher:

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 136

ISBN-13: 9789079700066

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In The Global Politics of Pharmaceutical Monopoly Power, researcher and global advocate Ellen 't Hoen explains how new global rules for pharmaceutical patenting impact access to medicines in the developing world. The book gives an account of the current debates on intellectual property, access to medicines, and medical innovation, and provides historical context that explains how the current system emerged. This book supports major policy changes in the management of pharmaceutical patents and the way medical innovation is financed in order to protect public health and, in particular, promote access to essential medicines for all. The Open Society Institute provided support to translate this report into Russian.