What do textbooks, basmati rice and Microsoft Windows have in common?
Joseph Stiglitz, 2001 Nobel laureate in economics and professor at Columbia University, said all of these items have at some point been considered intellectual property-creative work with economic value that is protected by copyright and patent laws.
Stiglitz spoke to a packed auditorium Friday at the School of Law as the guest speaker of the sixth annual Meredith and Kip Frey Lecture in Intellectual Property.
He said his interest in intellectual property began 20 years ago, when a Chinese publisher called to ask if Stiglitz would write a preface to a pirated edition of one of his own textbooks.
"As a good academic, I was enthusiastic about the idea," Stiglitz joked. "My view was that the reason we write these things is not to make money but to influence ideas, to influence the shape of intellectual debate."
Stiglitz's speech, entitled "The Economic Foundations of Intellectual Property," focused on the impediments on development and innovation imposed by regulations on intellectual property.
"Knowledge is a public good," he said. "Intellectual property circumscribes its use and thus necessarily causes an inefficiency."
Stiglitz said the present intellectual property system must be reformed in order to both provide incentives for innovation and to encourage further development.
"How do we motivate innovation but how do we also finance research?" he asked.
Too many stringent regulations protecting intellectual property currently lead to monopolies by the original creators and hamper advancement, Stiglitz said.
Specifically, he spoke of his opposition to the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement while serving on former President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers. The agreement restricted access to generic life-saving medicines in developing countries to the benefit of pharmaceutical companies.
"When trade representatives signed the TRIPS agreement in 1994, they were essentially signing the death warrants of thousands of people in sub-saharan Africa," Stiglitz said.
He noted that intellectual property laws often do not act in the welfare of society, citing the competition between private entrepreneurs in the Human Genome Project of the early 1990s.
"If [private entrepreneurs] could get it decoded first-identify the gene, say, that codes for breast cancer-they would have a patent," Stiglitz said. "That would mean that anyone who wanted to get tested to see if they had that gene would have to pay a huge sum of money."
For the 50 million Americans without health insurance, such a test would be impossible, he added.
Audience members said Stiglitz presented the complexities of intellectual property in an articulate and understandable manner.
"I thought he covered a lot of ground and made it very accessible, in addition to advancing his own theory on how the patent system should be improved," said Cheryl Fakhry, a first-year law student.
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