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One of the most distinctive and thematic recommendations – the idea that innovation systems should be set up so that the state shares in the gains from innovation – is one that I find particularly problematic.¶ (NOTE: Before I go on, I should explain why I’m focusing on this recommendation. Several of the recommendations in The Entrepreneurial State’s Appendix make good sense. The argument that governments should not underinvest in R&D and human capital formation (p 196) is wise, especially (as Professor Mazzucato points out) in the context of ongoing Eurozone austerity. The idea of expanding and reforming the Technology Strategy Board (now Innovate UK), scrapping the Patent Box and taking a hard look both at small business subsidies and the short-termism of British capital markets are sensible ideas that have been advocated by a range of economists and innovation experts.¶ But the recommendation that the state should be entrepreneurial by participating in the upside of its innovation funding deserves special attention partly because of its originality, partly because of the attention that it has attracted in the sector, and partly because of its prominence both in the book’s conclusion and in other summaries of The Entrepreneurial State’s argument, such as this one from Professor Mazzucato’s own department.)¶ The point of The Entrepreneurial State’s gain-sharing recommendation is to change the balance of risks and rewards the state faces when it comes to innovation: “reward the wins when they happen so that the returns can cover the losses from the inevitable failures” (p187). Mazzucato suggests three ways of doing this: “golden shares of IPR and a national innovation fund”, “income-contingent loans and equity” and “development banks”.¶ In practice they all involve the government retaining a financial interest in companies developing innovations based on public funding. But this proposal looks deeply problematic, both from the point of view of public administration and politics.¶ First of all, it presumes a clear link between specific IP and business performance. This may be straightforward for, say, a biotech company developing a single drug based on a molecule discovered with an NIH grant: the research is a significant cause of most or all of the firm’s business.¶ But it rapidly becomes hard to measure. Rolls-Royce plc relies on hundreds of pieces of research, many of which have been funded by public funds. Some may be vital to Rolls-Royce’s profitability, some may be marginal. What will Rolls-Royce owe the taxpayer? Will it be agreed when the IP is handed over, or ex post? Will we employ civil servants to work it out? How will they know? It’s hard to see how this would not cause huge uncertainty to companies considering commercialising public research while at the same time entail a prodigious, possibly impossible bureaucratic challenge.

What’s more, recouping innovation spending from companies that make direct use of publicly funded research would be a tough political sell. It helps to think through how this would look: the government would be charging a special levy on businesses like ARM, Rolls-Royce or GSK, while exempting Tesco, Provident Financial and Betfair, all in the name of promoting innovation. Whether or not the money went to fund further research, it would be, as civil servants like to say, a presentational nightmare, and the government would be accused of privileging low-R&D companies over high-R&D ones, exacerbated many of the widely-voiced critiques of the UK’s economy.

It should perhaps not surprise us that leading critics of neoliberal information policy embrace a neoliberal conception of the state. After all, neoliberalism is not merely an ideology, but also a set of policy prescriptions that may have helped to call forth the state that it has described. As David Harvey puts it, "the neoliberal fear that special-interest groups would pervert and subvert the state is nowhere better realized than in Washington, where armies of corporate lobbyists … effectively dictate legislation to match their special interests." 37 There are, it must be said, few areas of law that better exemplify this problem than IP law. For example, Jessica Litman has documented the astonishing process through which the 1976 Copyright Act was drafted, in which Congress delegated most of the drafting to interest groups that were forced to negotiate with one another. 38 Other scholars have offered similarly startling accounts of the genesis of the most important IP treaty today, the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement. TRIPS [*139] came into force in 1996, revolutionizing international IP law by both imposing new standards and by rendering them enforceable through the WTO's dispute-resolution system, which authorizes trade retaliation to enforce its judgments. Most countries in the world are members of TRIPS, and the Agreement introduced, for developing countries in particular, substantial new obligations, such as the obligation to grant patents on medicines and food-related inventions. Several excellent histories of the treaty have been written, documenting its beginnings as a brash idea proposed by "twelve chief executive officers (representing pharmaceutical, entertainment, and software industries)." 39 As Susan Sell has described, the TRIPS Agreement was a triumph of industry organizing. Through TRIPS, Industry revealed its power to identify and define a trade problem, devise a solution, and reduce it to a concrete proposal that could be sold to governments. These private sector actors succeeded in getting most of what they wanted from a global IP agreement, which now has the status of public international law. 40 These histories have made the neoliberal discourse of state "capture" irresistible in this field of law, perhaps moreso even than in other fields. 41

As Mazzucato and colleagues point out, governments have “accepted externally imposed rules-based frameworks limiting discretionary interventions.” They have done so because international trade agreements are not about trade at all—as even a classical neoliberal might point out—but about entrenching the oligopolies of home-grown IP corporations and billionaires, owners of intangibles, and controllers of global value chains. Governments have neglected antitrust enforcement at home, Sell argues, because they care less about concentration in domestic markets and more about their corporations being globally competitive. Ever since the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations that ended in 1993, the United States has worked tirelessly to increase property protection, whether through the Trans-Pacific Partnership or massive public investment in the military to ensure enforcement. This protection explains why, even in a global pandemic, “missionoriented” governments could not ensure the global distribution of a vaccine. Patents had been written to exclude others from using knowledge owned by the vaccine manufacturing corporations or Big Pharma. And it's not just vaccines. A review of the range of masks used during the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that 309 had industrybacked patents behind them. As Sell argues, any government wishing to protect the health and thereby the domestic economy of its people—by compulsory licensing and parallel importation, say, to make essential medicines affordable and accessible—would find its pro-health initiatives blocked by Big Pharma, given the threat to profits and to shareholder capital gains. This state-backed enforcement of concentrated economic power, together with a state-subsidized financial system buoyed by central bankers, gives the lie to the suggestion that our dominant economic model is neoliberal. In other words, the problem is not that states are not action-oriented. Instead it is that taxpayer resources are deployed to sponsor an increasingly concentrated private sector that has intensified inequality. It is thanks to political decisions—such as the Nixon Shock to international financial architecture fifty years ago—that capital is mobile, that public assets are privatized, and that taxes are dodged. Meanwhile, taxpayers have repeatedly come to the rescue of the private, globalized, and deregulated financial system, bailing them out when they inevitably fall into crisis. In just the same way, the power of today's Big Pharma oligopolies depends on capital mobility, tax evasion, and a private, deregulated shadow banking system, which in turn is backed and managed by public servants at central banks. Putting all this together, the lesson is clear: if governments are to use Earth's finite resources to develop viable strategies for tackling the grand challenges that threaten the very existence of human civilization, the answer cannot lie in the sound creation of an “industrial policy,” however ambitious. The globalized, financialized, monopoly capitalism of our day instead requires wholesale structural reform. Recognition of the role played by taxpayers and states in upholding and extending the power of both Silicon Valley oligopolies and Wall Street investment banks should provide the rationale, the anger, the energy, and the momentum to bring today's capitalism to heel in the interests of public institutions, public resources, and the public good. Only then will it be possible for governments to devise strategies that protect the security and interests of their people.

Foucault’s use of the term “discourse” would not be out of place to use in our discussion of intellectual property and as a strategy to understand the ‘propertisation,’ commodification, ownership and protection of ideas.254 Similar to the discourse of colonialism, intellectual property as a ‘discourse’ is used to construct, justify and legitimate further expansion of intellectual property’s commodity form and its application. The discourse of colonialism can be a useful comparator in trying to understand and discuss the ever-expansive growth of intellectual property. In general, the discourse of colonisation helps to frame, conceptualise and understand the propertising and commodifying discourses of “progress” and “innovation” inherent in intellectual property claims. As an analogy and to paraphrase Saïd: “Without examining… [intellectual property] as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce – [intellectual property]” 255 and the power required to construct intellectual property as a commodity and system and impose it on the world.

Instead, we begin our analysis by looking at the broader global system in which knowledge and information operate: a settler-colonial system that extracts wealth, knowledge, and culture from economically marginalised communities and inequitably redistributes their economic fruits to the wealthiest and most powerful. This approach is in line with critiques that activists and critical scholars have long made of open-access movements: that the central focus on liberty values ignores concerns about equality; that a romantic notion of the ‘public domain’ as a neutral landscape where every person can reap its riches ignores its real role in exploiting the labour and bodies of people of colour, women, people from the Global South, and the impoverished. We now know that the ‘public domaining’ of Indigenous knowledge about local flora and fauna, traditional medicines, folklore, or traditional cultural expressions has enabled Big Pharma to take Indigenous knowledge, transform it into IP, and become the exclusive owner of that knowledge: a phenomenon known as biopiracy (external link). Abolitionist creativity also disagrees with an ideological belief that runs through some prominent segments of the open-access movements, namely that the system once worked well, but that ‘unfortunately, our IP regimes have strayed far from their original purposes’. For the colonised, for Indigenous Peoples whose collective knowledge has been ransacked, for communities forced into oppressive trade agreements (e.g. TRIPS), for the rising number of modern slaves (external link) working in global supply chains powered by intangibles, it is hard to see how the IP system ever worked for them – or what decades of reformist attempts inside IP law in the US have accomplished. For abolitionists, the system is not broken and in need of reform, tweaking, and tinkering. It is working as it was designed to work, as a settler-colonial legal and economic structure. And we are running out of time and of magical thinking waiting for public policy to somehow turn favourable in a corporate-dominated oligarchy.

The challenge, therefore, is to articulate a counterargument that manages to remain true—and continue to expand—the liberation movements for race, gender, sexuality, prison abolition, and indigenous rights that arose in the 1960s, but to do so from a refounded form of social protection that combats the unprecedented precarity and inequality of class that is toxic to our long-term survival and inimical to our ability to maintain solidarity on any of these fronts. In short, this challenge requires dismantling the reified culture of property that remains fundamentally unexamined in American society even as we confront the resurgent reaction of patriarchal, heteronormative, white supremacy. Labor, Global Production, and Intellectual Property But as fraught as our domestic politics are, the international scene compounds them. Here, the contradictions of the social division of labor that haunt the “democratic paradox” are global in scale, harder to square with a simple move to economic nationalism, and, as suggested at the start of the chapter, tenuously secured through IPR. To illustrate this difficulty, note Secretary of Commerce Ross’s (2017) explanation of the problem the United States faces in its relationship with China on the topic of IPR: “Rather than building a globally competitive free market economy in order to compete, China has chosen instead to compel American companies that want to operate in China to turn over proprietary technology and intellectual property.” As in the Vanguard America manifesto, Ross’s understanding of the “free market” is decidedly limited, but it ironically echoes Hale’s reappropriation of the term from the libertarians of his day. The use of the word “compel” here is curious—after all, no company is forced to go to China. Until two decades ago, in fact, almost no American company did: only the very structured opening of the market internally in the 1980s and the acceptance of China into the WTO in the late 1990s made it possible. Offshoring production to China was a conscious strategy from which U.S. businesses disproportionately profited for the better part of the next decade (see Harvey 2005). Taking advantage of the cheap labor and lax enforcement of labor, health, and environmental standards was hailed as the next chapter in the ruthless genius of the neoliberal corporate playbook. It is counterintuitive to imagine that China now holds the upper hand, not because it has helped finance this expansion but simply because it has made certain demands for businesses that want to operate within its borders. As Barry Lynn (2002) has noted, the spread of skills and knowledge was the advantage supposedly accruing to countries that accepted U.S. corporate investment as part of the bargain of globalization. But even more than a decade ago, Lynn identifies the potential geopolitical and political economic outcome of this arrangement: At the end of the day, who “owns” the actual semiconductor plant [or, we should now add, the patents for those semiconductors] matters far less than where the plant is located, because whoever physically controls the production of semiconductors can paralyze thousands of the world’s assembly lines with the flick of a switch. Beijing need not even declare a blockade of Taiwan, backed by a threat to use its missiles, in order to cause economic havoc. If it succeeds in luring enough key manufacturing capacity, Beijing will need only to threaten a peaceful closure of its own border, a sit-down strike if you will, organized by the most powerful labor syndicate in the world. (Ibid., p. 40) And, at the end of the day, this power is what Ross means by “compel.” Despite the fact that Apple owns the patents to specific components of the iPhone or iPad, despite the fact that its trademarks and copyrights aid in an unprecedented tax-avoidance scheme that has accrued the company nearly $200 billion in offshore accounts, China houses the workers capable of producing its products. This labor, the supply chains in the country, the rare earth elements available in nearby mines, are all essential to Apple’s timely production of the next utopian device. And, as with the Ecuadorian film distributors or the Bolivian textile manufacturers, the only means Apple has of maintaining its superiority is through the casually enforced laws of IPR. But despite Ross’s pleadings, even this leverage will not suffice for long. The Chinese company Huawei recently surpassed Apple as the second-largest cell phone manufacturer in the world, after Samsung. This title is really a misnomer, however, because unlike Huawei, Apple owns almost none of its manufacturing capacity. Like Huawei, the tacit knowledge for the assembly of its major products resides in the minds and hands of Chinese workers. As Frederick Winslow Turner recognized in the early twentieth century—and as Ross is wont to admit today—the power of this labor confronts the corporate owners. This power, in the end, is what increasingly compels Apple, Boeing, and other Fortune 500 companies to do business in China—and to provide those workers with the technical schematics and legal permissions to assemble their products. American citizens should resist the temptation to fall for Ross’s call to arms. For in the end, the advancement of Chinese corporations and workers was supposed to be the result of the globalization process. The fact that the “knowledge economy” here at home has failed to develop at anything like the necessary scale was all but predictable for anyone looking at the ways in which the social division of labor works in any factory or factory town. Just as we should resist the impulse to side with the reactionary counter triple movement, closing borders to immigrants or deporting those formerly covered by DACA, we should also resist the attempt to use IPR to enforce a paradoxically autarkic imperialism that attempts to maintain the U.S. position at the top of the international division of labor and power. Instead, we should attempt to organize for a new, postcapitalist world, seeing the ways in which our collective labors are unjustly appropriated by corporate conglomerates across the borders between nations and the increasingly hazy division between mental and material labor, cyberspace and meatspace. As Ellen Meiksins Wood reminds us, the more cherished goal of enlightened modernity was supposed to be the improvement of humanity, not property (2002, p. 189). As we live in a world with fewer jobs available for U.S. workers, we should not attempt to wrest them back from China; instead, we should reimagine our culture of property and reorganize the distribution of the resources such that fewer people here or there need to work. Or, in James Livingston’s more succinct version: “Fuck work” (2016, loc. 44). Although the calls for full automation and a universal basic income (UBI) (Srnicek and Williams 2016) may be premature—and problematic in the ways in which they subtly maintain the very social division of labor that is the root of the problems we face—the movement for something like these changes is clearly possible. But as with the imposition of capitalism in its early days, this call is far more of a political and cultural problem than an economic or technological one. As evidence, take the recent attempt by the rabidly antilabor Wisconsin governor Scott Walker to bring a Foxconn factory—the company that manufactures Apple’s products—to his state. To facilitate the bargain, he offered the company $3 billion in tax incentives for the thirteen thousand jobs it would bring. As Reason points out, this sum is the equivalent to $231,000 per job (Britschgi 2017), or almost $20,000 per worker annually for each job paying $55,000 (Schwartz, Cohen, and Davis 2017). If the state of Wisconsin—and especially Walker, one of the most public proponents of the Tea Party agenda—can be persuaded to fork over $20,000 to subsidize workers for a Chinese corporation, then it is not unreasonable to imagine that it could be persuaded to simply give that amount (which is in the ballpark of figures suggested for a UBI) to its citizens; it is simply a matter of organizing power in that direction. On the other hand, as Qiu has extensively documented, Foxconn’s labor and human rights practices in China are some of the most reprehensible in the world: suppressing wages, threatening journalists, and doing nothing to improve “a merciless ‘flexible’ labor management regime, which [has] led to the suicide of several Foxconn workers since June 2007” (2012, p. 182). This regime of accumulation is secured by the repressive apparatus of the Chinese state and the legal suture of global IPR. How will transplanting this model of labor management to the U.S. Midwest transform it? What will be the response of the everyday culture to the imposition of what will be only the latest regime of merciless labor management? Thanks in part to Foxconn and its Chinese workers, we have more tools available than ever for organizing that culture. Even in the supposedly controlled Chinese media environment, “the new wave of labor-capital clashes was triggered by the suicides—helpless individual acts in the beginning but with powerful butterfly effects within and beyond Foxconn—the tools of everyday connectivity were converted, almost instantly, into tools of labor solidarity,” with cell phone cameras and text messaging helping workers organize strikes at a Chinese Honda factory; and concerts, folk theater performances, and “most importantly hundreds of poems expressing their emotions at the time [. . .] easily circulated through mobile phone (especially through SMS) and Internet among workers and concerned citizens” (Qiu 2012, p. 184). The key now is to penetrate that great Chinese firewall, to include those workers in our struggle and include ourselves in theirs. As Qiu reminds us: No matter how “immaterial” the iPhone culture seems to be, its material dimension is always indispensable, depending, first of all, on the physical labor of Foxconn workers. Labor is also integral to the research and development of the iPhone, the production, testing, and installation of its software, and even the consumption of the fingertip economy. Labor is not a thing. It is a perspective. Only by using this perspective can we start to treat the workers with dignity and extend this dignity though our activities online and offline. (Ibid., p. 186) IP is one tool among many for dividing not only the fruits of our collective labors but also the laboring classes, undermining our potential solidarity and legitimate demands. But with these emergent tools and platforms, the workers of the world can unite as never before, and thanks to the increasingly punitive, unequal neoliberal state, we truly have little to lose but our chains.

The crux of much intellectual property (IP) scholarship in the last two decades has been how to define a progressive, counter-hegemonic research agenda vis-à-vis the seemingly irresistible expansion of property rights and the consequent contraction of the public domain in every corner of the intellectual public sphere. Footnote1 To be sure, the very notion of a ‘progressive’ agenda is highly subjective. For lawyers working for – or on behalf of – private corporations or institutions that defend corporate interests, the research agenda will consist essentially in (re)searching the best solutions to maximise extraction of value and capital accumulation by taking advantage of IP rights. In this context, a progressive agenda is simply the one that ‘progresses’ the capital’s interests and increases market power. By contrast, academic researchers have the right to set their own agenda and they may choose to use this constitutionally protected freedom to question, interrogate, and criticise dominant power structures – and specifically the way in which those structures influence, shape and make use of IP rights.

The problem is that power structures change over time and so does the interpretation of what should be defined a truly counter-hegemonic approach to IP.Footnote2 Therefore, it may be the case that a research agenda loses its progressive feature, or even becomes regressive, if it does not take into due account the changes in the dominant power structures. I argue that this is precisely the risk of IP scholarship today.

Recent legislative and judicial actions concerning intellectual property law reveal several stark trends. Congress has been remarkably hospitable to stronger intellectual property rights. Congress passed forty-three intellectual property laws during the time period in question. Of those that affected the substantive strength of intellectual property rights, over 80% made rights stronger.1 These laws made it easier to acquire intellectual property rights, broadened the scope of protection, and strengthened enforcement. The Supreme Court’s intellectual property jurisprudence, however, has moved largely in the opposite direction. The Court decided forty-four intellectual property cases from the October 2002–2003 Term through the October 2015–2016 Term, and of those that substantively affected the extent of rights, two-thirds weakened protection.

Footnote 1

What are commons? And what does it mean to make and share a commons? A commons is a property, a practice, or a knowledge that is

shared by a community. Our survival depends on many different kinds

The influence of neoliberal ideas over social and economic policy, over the last three decades and on both sides of the Atlantic, cannot be underestimated. Neoliberalism is hard to catalogue; it has been variously defined as a doctrine of political economy (Harvey 2007), an ideology (Turner 2008), and a “thought collective” (Mirowski 2009). For all its internal plurality, its adherents share a fundamental commitment to private property, free markets, and a strong state to enforce the law. The neoliberal defense of free markets acquires a political dimension when it equates freedom with free markets, adding a moral imperative to the classical justification of markets as the most efficient mechanism for the allocation of resources. Furthermore, the neoliberal state ought to be small but strong enough to effectively enforce the law, property rights, and secure the untroubled operation of markets. The dual prescription of unfettered markets and an assertive state have pervaded all policy domains, and in the case at hand, their decisive influence on the Bayh-Dole regime has been amply noted (Mirowski and Sent 2007; Nedeva and Boden 2006; Pestre 2005; Slaughter and Rhoades 2004). In Section The Changing Terms of the Bayh-Dole Debate, I bring these arguments to bear and discuss the centrality of “competitiveness,” as a key public value and a rhetoric trope, to the terms of the Bayh-Dole debate.

The second factor driving the policy drift in Bayh-Dole can be decomposed into two components, “bureaucratic drift” (McCubbins et al. 1987) and “legislative drift” (Horn and Shepsle 1989). Bureaucratic drift—that is, changes to the policy by administrative discretion—resulted from the failure of the enacting coalition to establish administrative procedures that would effectively constrain the profit motive, particularly with respect to exclusive licenses and the emergence of “creative” licensing practices (e.g. reach-through clauses). Legislative drift—that is, subsequent statutory amendments to the law that alter its mechanisms and aims—was the consequence of not providing for institutional mechanisms to replicate the political pressures of the enacting coalition, particularly with respect to limited benefits for large firms and sufficient authority for federal agencies to safeguard the public interest. To understand why the enacting coalition arrived at a compromise with respect to checks on the profit motive, limitations on large firms, and administrative regulatory discretion, I review in Section Changes in the Design of Bayh-Dole the terms of the compromise achieved by the enacting coalition and account for the drift in terms of amendments to Bayh-Dole, and other changes in the patent law and the patent system, including the creation of the Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit and key Supreme Court rulings on patentable subject matter.

BEGINNING IN THE early 1970s, the enemies of government patent ownership embraced a trendy new phrase in the nation’s political and economic lexicons: “global competitiveness.” To compete against Europe and Asia, the argument went, Washington had to incentivize innovation by relinquishing control of inventions made under government contract and hand them over to the private sector to handle them as they saw fit.

The argument was always a scrambled one. To start, it rested on the falsehood that government inventions were being purposefully withheld from industry, when public science was, by definition, readily available for licensing and use. During the contentious hearings held on one of the failed bills that preceded the Bayh-Dole Act, Michael Pertschuk, Federal Trade Commission chair under President Jimmy Carter, testified that there was “no factual basis” for claims that government ownership of patents was slowing or obstructing commercialization. He told a room of red-faced Republican lawmakers, “The available evidence shows just the opposite.”

Health care costs should be going down — not up. Innovation and advancing technology should be making us healthier for less and less cost. Why are the costs rising faster than anything else?

The reason is that the power of innovation is not being applied. Patents and incentives are misaligned. Consider computing for comparison: Moore’s Law predicts ever decreasing costs for computing power, driven by market demand for computing. But in health care, systems we have in place have converted the demand for health into a demand is for services — not improved health. We have turned drug companies into pushers who want to keep us dependent on long-term expensive treatment; and we have incentivized care providers to want us to keep coming back.

But private property also means exclusion. The sign “Private Property—Keep Out!” puts this message bluntly. Private ownership designates who has rights of access and use and who can derive benefit from the property. Private property is seen as one of the founding pillars of modern democracies. Property-owning individuals are seen as independent sovereign beings, no longer obligated to landlords or attached to a clan, who can freely exercise their democratic rights. Of course this vision traditionally excluded the rights of women and slaves, who, until not that long ago, were considered forms of private property and denied a democratic vote. Private property is also seen as one of the foundations of modern economies. The argument goes that land and other resources are best placed in the hands of private owners who will look after them and use them productively. Of course this ignores the countless ways that this productivity rests on shared assets like the common law and the earth’s gifts. The prominence that is given to private property overshadows other forms of property that are also essential to our well-being. Public property, for example, is owned by a government or authority and managed on the behalf of citizens and residents for their benefit. And when it comes to our most basic well-being, survival depends on many things that are not formally owned—our atmosphere, for example, or our water sources, sunlight, the resources of the sea, and our shared intellectual property. These are forms of open-access property that can benefit all. But often there are no formal rules of ownership and use, and, as a result, these essential resources are all too easily degraded and abused. Today there is a push for the privatization of public property. Governments and organizations are portrayed as unwieldy, inefficient managers of public property who should step aside and let private owners take charge. Everything is up for grabs, from roads and water supplies to parklands and libraries. Private ownership is also presented as the most efficient means of managing open-access resources. Privatization is occurring via a sell-off of rights to familiar resources such as water, fisheries, forests, and minerals, as well as new “resources” such as carbon emissions. It is also occurring via the taking of resources that are supposedly “idle.” The long-standing knowledge resources of Indigenous communities are being pirated and commercialized by private companies in a new wave of colonization. The deep-sea floor is being privately mined for copper and gold, and the Arctic Circle is being mined for iron ore and other resources. This period of privatization is beginning at the very time that our global circumstances demand not just collective thinking and acting but a move away from the boundary making that separates mine from yours and you from me. Can we take back property and better care for the resources that sustain all who inhabit this planet? We think we can, but we need to reconsider the ways we relate to the things around us, and we especially need to reconsider the privileging of private property. In the Northern Territory of Australia, Aboriginal people are caring for “their” land not just for their immediate benefit as “owners” but for the good of the wider Australian population. They are creating an “us” that acknowledges the interdependence between humans in very different circumstances and between humans and the environment. Through their example we can see how we might relate to property in ways that take us beyond distinctions between yours and mine and you and me.

But at another level, there are problems with the bulk of R&D coming from the business community. First, vital national interests may get overlooked to the detriment of the overall country. Second, profitable consumer products likely will get advantaged over unprofitable societal innovations, even if the latter are important for public health and national security. Third, innovations that need to get financed in order to promote longterm public goods may receive short shrift over items that promise a quick payoff. Corporate leaders are under enormous pressure to meet quarterly revenue projections and that can skew their R&D allocation decisions.

In an era of globalization, for instance, we have seen a number of cases where business leaders made decisions to outsource key products and components to other nations, such as China, India, and South Korea. As an example, semiconductor manufacturing largely was outsourced to Taiwan and South Korea despite the vitality of chips to the digital economy. When COVID upended global supply chains, our chip dependency on other countries limited growth in key sectors such as automotives and electronics.

Indeed, governments and philanthropic foundations dispense funds primarily based on how peer reviewers evaluate the quality and feasibility of the researchers’ ideas and ability to accomplish project goals. Meanwhile, the private sector invests in technologies that seem most lucrative and uses intellectual property rights to protect information about their work to prevent competition. In both respects, there is little social discussion about whether we have settled on the right solution, how this solution might impact society, and whether there might be alternatives. And even when there is discussion about a controversial emerging technology, this rarely affects the technical endeavor itself. Implicit is the idea that technologists are able to identify the best solutions and should be free to create them, and that they will be able to identify and solve any problems that arise. If needed, regulators can step in to resolve any serious “market failures.”

The patent system reinforces this approach. In recent decades, courts and legislatures have expanded the inventor’s power by permitting intellectual property monopolies earlier on in the innovation process, such as allowing patents on DNA. As a result, universities—where much early-stage research is done—have established technology transfer offices to help their researchers file patent applications and then license patented inventions to companies who can develop them further. In addition to increasing the costs of the resulting technologies and enclosing the public domain, this system also encourages siloed research, where outsiders have little opportunity to observe, critique, or improve technologies as they are being built.

There is a growing movement to address inequality through technological innovation. Some institutions that fund or conduct innovation have established scholarship and mentorship programs to diversify science, engineering, technology, and math, assuming that a more representative technical workforce will lift up historically disadvantaged communities. Others are investing in programs dedicated to innovation “for good,” as the consulting firm McKinsey puts it, or sponsoring researchers who investigate how technology can be made more fair, accountable, and transparent. Meanwhile, governments are striving to incorporate equity considerations into the regulation of new technologies.

All of these initiatives are likely to yield some benefits, but they take for granted that the basic structure of the innovation process should be left alone.

(http://www.usingenglish.com/glossary/possessive-pronoun.html)

Mine, yours, his, hers, its, ours, theirs are the possessive pronouns used to substitute a noun and to show possession or ownership. EG. This is your disk and that's mine. (Mine substitutes the word disk and shows that it belongs to me.)

However, any intellectual property that results from publicly funded research does not belong to the public, who paid for it, but instead is available for the private sector to enclose and profit from. Indeed, the state does not recoup anything directly for that investment. The state is left to cross its fingers and hope that it receives a satisfactory return on its investment in R&D through economic growth, the creation of new jobs and the corporate and private tax that this leads to. However, what historically may have been true is today highly contested. Many companies are very good at minimising their local tax bills by creatively structuring their businesses while the innovative new companies, especially the tech-based ones, do not generally create mass employment opportunities. We contend that this needs to change, with the public sector taking more direct ownership of the resulting IP in order to share more broadly in the rewards, rather than just the risks.

In accordance with international standards, the term "protection of intellectual property rights" means the activities of authorized state authorities to recognize rights, restore rights and remove obstacles that impede the realization of the rights and interests of subjects of intellectual property rights. In this regard, depending on the context, this term means legal protection of intellectual property rights, restoration of rights (protection of rights) of the right holder, enforcement of rights (Izbash, 2018).