Paradigm shift in the global IP regime: The agency of academics

ABSTRACT

The global intellectual property (IP) regime is in the midst of a paradigm shift in favour of greater access to protected work. Current explanations of this paradigm shift emphasize the agency of transnational advocacy networks, but ignore the role of academics. Scholars interested in global IP politics have failed to engage in reflexive thinking. Building on the results from a survey of 1679 IP experts, this article argues that a community of academics successfully broke the policy monopoly of practitioners over IP expertise. They instilled some scepticism concerning the social and economic impacts of IP among their students as well as in the broader community of IP experts. They also provided expert knowledge that was widely amplified by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and some intergovernmental organizations, acting as echo chambers to reach national decision makers. By making these claims, this article illustrates how epistemic communities actively collaborate with other transnational networks, rather than competing with them, and how they can promote a paradigm change by generating, rather than reducing, uncertainty.

KEYWORDS:

• Intellectual property
• epistemic community
• professions
• patent
• copyright
• transnational network
• lawyers
• paradigm shift
• World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)
• survey

Notes

¹A unidimensional scale is by definition a rough simplification. The reality of political debates is obviously more complex than simplistic dichotomies. One can advocate for stronger and more standardized protection in some contexts, but for greater flexibility and access in others. Moreover, the analysis of the scale is based on relative, rather than fixed, positions. A group of respondents is considered as more or less in favour of the new paradigm as compared with other respondents, and not based on a stable reference point. For analytical purposes, however, relative positioning on a unidimensional scale is a useful heuristic device to apprehend empirical realities.

²To minimize the risk that one respondent strategically influenced the results, only one respondent was allowed per Internet protocol address.

³However, several questions were not mandatory. This reduces the quantity of responses for these questions, but arguably increases their quality.

⁴For the multi-categorical variables of area of expertise and professional sector, ‘patent’ and ‘national government’ were the values selected for the constant.

⁵Practitioners are understood as any IP experts in sectors other than academia and with a reported primary area of interest other than policymaking.

⁶For reasons of disclosure, the ICTSD contributed to this study by providing the names and email addresses of some of the respondents. The author was invited a number of times by the ICTSD to present his research in Geneva and to publish papers on their website.