"When you find a diamond that belongs to nobody, it is yours. When you discover an island that belongs to nobody, it is yours. When you get an idea before any one else, you take out a patent on it: it is yours. So with me: I own the stars, because nobody else before me ever thought of owning them" - Antoine de Saint-Exupery, 'The Little Prince'

In 1621 Dutch military forces killed 90 per cent of the population of the Banda islands in Indonesia and felled the nutmeg plantations across the island. The reason was that the Dutch East India Company saw nutmeg as 'their' product and felt it was unacceptable for other producers to undercut them. It clearly was not morally acceptable, but did it even make economic sense? Arab traders had been profitably shipping nutmeg and other spices around the world for centuries without regulating producers to anything like this extent.

It may have been one of the most dramatic cases, but attempts to 'protect' trade in particular products has a long history. The medieval guilds in England monopolised the production of everything from candles to cheese. For centuries China saw paper, silk and gunpowder as 'its' products and kept their production methods secret. Economists nowadays condemn such protectionism as grossly inefficient and an obstacle to economic development. Get rid of the red tape, they say, and allow every individual to be an entrepreneur.

Yet today there are arguments about whether companies in nations facing AIDS epidemics should be allowed to produce cheap medical drugs and whether nations that can hardly afford an education system should be allowed to use free software in schools.

Private enterprise and unregulated competition is hailed by western governments as the only rational and efficient means of production and is contrasted with the obviously catastrophic inefficiency of centralised Stalinist police states. But when genuinely free trade, especially competition from poorer nations, threatens the profits of the largest western companies they demand that their governments set up global policing systems to 'protect their freedom'.

President Bush's declaration that he wishes to set up a global intellectual property enforcement system to protect US industries and a Global Intellectual Property Rights Academy to train foreign judges and enforcement officials in international “intellectual property obligations" illustrate this contradiction well. Effectively a global police force is being proposed to prevent places such as Brazil, India, Russia, Thailand, China and the Middle East from emulating the economic development of Western nations.

CROP PROTECTION
"That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property" - Thomas Jefferson, from a letter to Isaac McPherson, 1813

The view that every technique used to make production more efficient or used to improve a product should become the private monopoly of the inventor contradicts the basic principles of the free market. It also contradicts the reality of economic development. The building blocks of western economies are not western inventions. Wheat was developed in Iraq, as was the brick. Bronze and iron also probably come from the Middle East, as did the wheel. If the Sumerians had set up a global system to prevent other nations from producing 'their' inventions or to charge royalties on the use of these inventions the result for human progress would have been catastrophic. The reality was that these inventions were sufficiently useful to be developed by thousands of farmers and villagers without having to rely on profits from their use in the rest of the world. This situation contrasts rather dramatically with Order 81, a law introduced last year by the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, that prevents farmers from “re-using seeds of protected varieties”. Those introducing the law were probably unaware that they were in the nation where our primary agricultural crops had been developed six millennia ago through free exchange of improved seed varieties.

Invention and artistic creation seem to have progressed for thousands of years without the need for any global policing of inventions, without any regulation of the exchange in ideas, without restriction on the use and copying of artistic creations. An invention or product improvement is made because it is useful to the producer at the time. Others see the value of the new technique and copy it. Everyone benefits. That has been the nature of human progress since we descended from the trees. All traditional songs and literature are elaborations or refinements or alterations of earlier songs and stories. These were never seen a personal property but as cultural assets. A potter would be paid for his pots, a minstrel for his songs, but they would never have been paid by other potters or minstrels for the use of their designs – nor would they have had the right to stop others from improving their products.

In reality the vast majority of human evolution and economic productivity has happened despite governments not because of them. Whilst the Babylonian kings built their ziggurats, millions of Mesopotamian farmers got on with building their houses and growing their food, developing their seeds and bricks, without either the state control production or state protection of the intellectual property of individuals. Much the same is true today. The thousands of small improvements we make to our homes or to the ways we work in the office are copied by friends and colleagues for the benefit of all without any expectation of reward beyond their direct personal benefits. It is only the largest corporations - those that are, or hope to become, monopolies – that have the power to call upon the government to prevent the rest of us from emulating their products.

CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE PUBLIC
Advocates of global corporations often use the rhetoric of the free market and references to Adam Smith to justify their position. One wonders how many of them have even read The Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith certainly was not advocating global intellectual property laws in mind when he said:

"A monopoly granted either to an individual or to a trading company has the same effect as a secret in trade or manufactures. The monopolists, by keeping the market constantly understocked, by never fully supplying the effectual demand, sell their commodities much above the natural price, and raise their emoluments, whether they consist in wages or profit, greatly above their natural rate." (vol. I, bk. I, ch. 7.)

And in relation to the predecessors of such groups as the Business Software Alliance, who band together to defend their various monopolies, he said:

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice." (vol. I, bk. I, ch. 10.)

Smith's vision of thousands of small enterprises in every town freely competing with one another is at least as far from the current system of multinational monopolies and anti-competitive intellectual property restrictions as it is from state communism. He would have seen the free and unregulated spread of ideas, inventions, literature and music as being as important to the wealth of nations as the free and unregulated trade in products. In relation to any of them monopoly, regulation and restriction of access constitute an illegitimate obstacle to freedom, creativity and wealth for all. In Smith's own words:

"All systems either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man or order of men. The sovereign [ie government] is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient: the duty of superintending the industry of private people." (The Wealth of Nations, vol. II, bk. IV, ch. 9.)”

Robert Vint