TRIPS Originated From Western Corporate Interests and Further Exacerbates Global Inequality.
Lystrup 15 (Lauren Lystrup, Is part of the Office of the County Counsel since 2022. As a member of the Education Law Team, Lauren provides advice to the Santa Clara County Office of Education as well as to local school and community college districts. As a member of the Labor and Employment Team, she advises County departments on all aspects of labor and employment law. She also advises the Equal Opportunity Division on employment investigations and accommodations. Before this, Lauren represented youth with disabilities in administrative actions, civil litigation, and negotiations with local education agencies. She litigated multiple putative class action lawsuits involving disability and race discrimination claims. Lauren’s professional expertise includes labor and employment, civil rights, and special education law. University of California, Berkeley School of Law, J.D., 2018, “Decolonial Futures and the Law: Reflections on Mitigating Decolonial Futures and the Law: Reflections on Mitigating Projects of Coloniality) DePaul University Libraries College of Education Theses and Dissertations, Spring 2015, https://via.library.depaul.edu/soe_etd/77?utm_source=via.library.depaul.edu%2Fsoe_etd%2F77&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages) GGA
Vandana Shiva (1997) strongly advocates for an opening of the commons and abolition of Intellectual Property Rights, which she sees a system legalizing pirating of indigenous knowledge for corporate profit. In Biopiracy Shiva (1997) describes the ways in which corporations profit from the privatization of indigenous knowledge and life itself, selling back the same idea at exponentially higher rates and exacerbating poverty. The same economic relationship characterized imperialism and colonization, where the colonies supplied the raw material to be manufactured by industrial factories in Europe, and sold back to the colonies at knavish rates (Rodney, 1972). Shiva (1997) traces the formation Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Law to major corporations to demonstrate the direct connection between IP and corporate interest and dispel the idea of law as democratically constructed with the needs of the people in highest consideration. “TRIPs…is not the result of democratic negotiations between the larger public and commercial interests or between industrialized countries and the Third World. It is the imposition of values and interests by Western transnational corporations on the diverse societies and cultures of the world” (p. 81). It was conceived, shaped and negotiated by three organizations representing the United States, Japan and Europe—the Intellectual Property Committee (IPC), Keidanren, and the Union of Industrial and Employees Confederations (UNICE). Intellectual Property Committee is comprised of 12 major U.S. corporations including: Hewlett Packard, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Monsanto, Pfizer, Rockwell, and Warner. Keidanren represents a federation of economic interests in Japan. Union of Industrial and Employees Confederation is the officially recognized spokesperson for European Business and industry (ibid.). Industries with greatest interests in IP are related to technology, medicine, and food/ agriculture. Medicine and agriculture are most obviously and most literally connected to questions of life and death. Technology, perhaps less obviously, is tied to questions of national economy and participation in a globalized economy, and therefore to sovereignty (Gana, 1996).