Intellectual Property and Human Development: Current Trends and Future Scenarios

This book examines the social impact of intellectual property laws. It addresses issues and trends relating to health, food security, education, new technologies, preservation of bio-cultural heritage, and contemporary challenges in promoting the arts. It explores how intellectual property frameworks could be better calibrated to meet socioeconomic needs in countries at different stages of development, with local contexts and culture in mind. Scenarios for the future are discussed. A resource for policy-makers, stakeholders, non-profits, and students, this volume furthermore highlights alternative modes of innovation that are emerging to address such diverse challenges as neglected or resurgent diseases in developing countries and the harnessing of creative possibilities on the Internet. The collected essays emphasize not only fair access by individuals and communities to intellectual property protected material, whether a cure, a crop variety, clean technology, a textbook, or a tune but also the enhancement of their own capabilities in cultural participation and innovation.

Review :
"Intellectual Property and Human Development is the result of years of multidisciplinary research bringing together new and contrasting perspectives in the continuing and stimulating debate on the role and place of IP in development. For those involved in this debate, this Book makes a distinguished contribution by stressing that there are no single answers to most of these questions and that a one single policy approach is inappropriate and impossible. In a time where IP issues are recurrent policy questions at the domestic and international level it is refreshing to read a book presenting a full gamut of interrelated development topics, stressing the need for more balanced and calibrated IP regimes." - Pedro Roffe Senior Fellow ICTSD, Project on Intellectual Property and Sustainable Development "This book takes up many of the critical issues concerning the future of intellectual property (IP) regimes in a globalized economy. By bringing a human development perspective to the analyses of the costs and benefits of IP, this collection underscores not only the importance of a multidisciplinary approach in this area, but also the need to think innovatively about communal forms of innovation. This effort by the Public Interest Intellectual Property Advisors (PIIPA) will become an important point of reference for all those interested in analyzing how IP can become an effective tool for human development." - Carlos A. Primo Braga Director, Economic Policy and Debt, The World Bank "This is the single best book so far on the rich interplay between intellectual property and human development. It should be a must-read for anyone wishing to be meaningfully engaged in the increasingly relevant debate on IP and development." - Anatole Krattiger Adjunct Professor, Cornell University and the Sandra Day O Connor College of Law, Arizona State University "Where the dominant economic approach to intellectual property law concentrates nearly exclusively on promoting the production of more things, the contributors to this book take a broader, human development approach and ask how intellectual property laws today thwart the realization of basic human capabilities, from the right to health and education to the ability to enjoy cultural life with others. The theoretical framework applied here seeks both to broaden our understanding of the connections between intellectual property and development, and to harness this law to promote, not hinder, human freedom. This book is required reading for all who care about intellectual property and global justice in the 21st century." - Madhavi Sunder Professor of Law, University of California, Davis