TVA is a state intervention to salvage the paradoxical and unsustainable system of private IP - there is no net benefit to holding on to a broken system

Rainer Kuhlen seems to understand the problem: although capitalism needs privatisation to exist, the exhaustion of its source of privatisation through primitive accumulation occurs by privatisation itself, making it an unsustainable form of exploitation; he nevertheless states that when the “information industry understands […] that they can hardly make any profit with the information itself, but rather through accompanying value-added offers, then the legislator will” have to act according to “the normative behavior and ethical expectations of creators and users in an electronic environment” and unrepresentative laws will be superfluous (Kuhlen, 2007, p. 230). More than fifteen years after the publication of his paper, reality has imposed itself and has instead shown that control of information is driving the new rounds of the so-called primitive accumulation. In a more contemporary publication, Keith E. Maskus and Jerome H. Reichman suggest that today “the regulation of knowledge goods in national markets impinges on the provision of other public goods—health, education, scientific research, agriculture and the environment—in ways that were virtually unknown to previous generations” (Maskus & Reichman, 2016, p. 349). Although TRIPS had the pivotal impulse to catapult intellectual property(private) to attain a higher level of real subsumption—given that intellectual property(private) or intellectual technology plays a crucial role “in the real subsumption of both intellectual and manual labour” (Jessop, 2000, p. 71)—in securing the primitive accumulation of the mind and the body—for instance, with gene appropriation—Dianne Nicol stresses that “the most important legislative intervention in the US was the Bayh–Dole Act 1980” (Nicol, 2021, p. 108).

While George has listed elements that hitherto have not been subjected to capitalist appropriation, Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite named others that, despite their general non-private characteristics, have been reduced to privatisation. By means of computational technology and science, “corporations have made things like DNA, algorithms and musical sounds targets of private ownership. What was once part of the intellectual commons has fallen into private hands” (Drahos & Braithwaite, 2002, p. 19). To enable a vast array of knowledge appropriation, intellectual property(private) appears to be the right tool, and limitations on patentability, for instance, were (mostly) eradicated. “The essence of the knowledge game was to propertize as much knowledge as possible” (Drahos & Braithwaite, 2002, p. 51). The totalising character is not merely a theoretical possibility. Restrictions on the patentability of discoveries were changed in order to accommodate the private appropriation of natural genes. “At an interview with the EPO in 1993, we were told that ‘everything would be patentable; it’s just a question of time’” (Drahos & Braithwaite, 2002, p. 144). Genetics appeared as a new Wild West of intellectual property(private). Patenting genetic sequences without knowing what they did or what they could be used for became paramount. “In 1991, the US PTO had applications covering 4000 such sequences. By September 1998, the number of sequences being applied for had climbed to over 500,000” (Drahos & Braithwaite, 2002, p. 156). Despite private capital having no guarantees, it could secure yields from the so-called primitive accumulation, and it was crucial for the private sector to block the public sector and the development that would prevent complete private control and gain through the privatisation process. This practice, however, became a paradoxical situation because it prompted US-American universities and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to apply for many patents. As public and governmental institutions were the main agents of scientific development and discoveries, then “the Industrial Biotechnology Association, a trade association that represented most of biotech in the US, also urged the NIH not to pursue the patents and to put the sequences into the public domain” (Drahos & Braithwaite, 2002, p. 156f).