Can IPR regimes benefit developing countries?

The New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) initiative, launched in July 2001 by the African Union, identifies as one of four main development issues ‘the creativity of African people, which in many important ways remains under exploited and underdeveloped’. Establishing actually how to develop and exploit creativity in Africa for development purposes is an important challenge (NEPAD 2001). More on NEPAD.

Perhaps because it involves money, middlemen and intangible rights, intellectual property has always been a subject of considerable controversy. Given persistent inequalities between rich and poor countries, these debates have been particularly intense around the question of how IPR regimes can benefit people in developing countries. Creative workers in developing countries often find themselves disadvantaged in terms of access to information about their IP rights and how to fully exploit them. Developing countries often find themselves importing intellectual property from elsewhere (e.g. Hollywood) at vast expense instead of supporting locally-produced film, music or publications. Local copyright industries suffer from a culture of piracy or illegal copying of rights-protected materials like books and tapes.
Here are three perspectives on the problems facing developing countries in trying to benefit from their IP:

Enforcement
Inequality
Capacity

Examples of recent IP-related debates:

Napster: free access to copyrighted music on the internet (Marcus 2001, Kushner 2002; )

The Boycott of Cell Press: the cost of online academic publishing. See also Open Access news (22-24 October 2003) on this issue.

Laugh it off: the freedom to make satirical comment using trademarks

Links:

WIPO: The Effects of TRIPS-Mandated Intellectual Property Rights on Economic Activities in Developing Countries (available in Adobe PDF format).