Intellectual Property Rights

It was reported this week that the combined wealth of the top thousand in the UK now stands at £360bn. This is three times higher than when New Labour took power ten years ago. These days some financiers seem to be getting US$1 billion annual bonuses! Is our only measure of success and morality to be made in money?

It also cannot surely be true that a 'New Labour' policy actually wishes to promote this division of national wealth. Is it fair? In a market economy, it is natural and right to allow the forces of supply/demand to govern much of the economic activity that takes place. However it cannot be an absolute priority that in a democratic society government should have no role to play at all in how wealth is made or shared out. Society has an interest! We must be reaching a limit now, and it cannot be right that decisions for society as a whole depend on the personal views of a very few, just because of money. You might of course argue that these 1000 rich people in the UK represent the brightest and the best of our nation, and should naturally be allowed to make political decisions for the rest of us, but I doubt if that is true!

Other aspects are causing concern. It does not seem to me to be right that there is no upper limit to the wealth any one individual should be allowed to control. Our laws should not be so restrictive as to protect the interests of only the very rich. on the other hand it is most important that those with inventive minds should be encouraged to develop new things and benefit personally from doing so. It would seem that the individual should benefit within his own lifetime, but that it is not the responsibility of society as a whole to guarantee that the inventors' heirs should benefit to the same extent. I see no problem in allowing untalented children to inherit something significant, but perhaps this should be measured in a few millions rather than billions. Society requires some balance. However charitable and good a man may be, he should not alone be allowed to bend society to his own way of thinking!

There is undoubtedly a problem of how to encourage costly research by business by allowing them to make a fair profit. Set against this, must be doubts whether we can really in a civilised society allow the poor to die in millions every year of diseases such as HIV, malaria, cancer, tuberculosis etc, merely because there is no profit to be made. The same might be said about famine, drought, violence and war where again we fail all the time.

Charles Dickens was most upset by the attitude of the American government because in the 19th century there was no copyright law in the USA, books printed in England were pirated in the USA without the payment of any royalties to the authors.
A broader view must now also be taken over the way the Americans and other Western countries pirate the brains of developing countries and persuade them to leave home to work in the West. Immigration of professors, doctors and scientists to the West is also a form of pirating intellectual property - only that the 'property' resides in the heads of clever people rather than on patent and copyright documents. Pillaging the schools and colleges of the developing world by the West for intellectual excellence is hardly a good example when at the same time we argue that patents, copyrights, and brands, often made by these immigrants, should be sacrosanct (by twisting the arms of politicians) for a long time ahead.

In a world where individuals and companies can earn billions, we need to rethink and explain more clearly why we are so strict on the theft of intellectial property when at the same time millons die of disease and we allow individuals to decide how our societie shsould be run - by the power of the purse. My suggestion is that nations should fund generously research that affects us all (malaria) until a solution is found. For individuals we should cap the wealth that any one person can accumulate in a life time by judicious taxation. We cannot call ourselves civilised if we ruthlessly exploit every business opportunity while millions die every year through neglect.