Patents facilitate capital accumulation. The impact is existential.

Patents are not merely a license bestowing a right for a limited period. Patents also exist as financial instruments136 used to increase shareholder value 137 and accumulate capital. As such, intellectual property can be a very devious instrument brandished by the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. As instruments of corporate (and class) power and ownership over the productive assets of society, patents and intellectual property can be decisive existential weapons used to create and broaden inequality and destabilise the democracy of the modern state. In a more innocent time, Mr. Justice Brandeis claimed that we had to make an existential choice. Our choice comes down to the fact that “[w]e may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both. 138 Or, more recently, as David Cay Johnston puts it, in terms of funding democratic institutions and in accordance to the logic and process of globalisation: Corporations are busy moving intellectual property such as patents, trademarks and the title to the company logo to entities organized in tax havens like Bermuda. These corporations then pay royalties to use their own intellectual property, allowing them to convert taxable profits in the United States [and Canada] into tax-deductible payments sent to Bermuda and other havens that impose little or no tax. You pay for this through higher taxes, reduced services or your rising share of our growing national debt. You also pay for it through incentives in the tax system for companies to build new factories overseas and to reduce employment in America, [Canada and Britain]. 139