Competitive Strategies for the Protection of Intellectual Property

H. Graham Rawlinson is a corporate lawyer with the international law
firm Torys in Toronto. He is co-author of The Canadian 100: The 100 Most
Influential Canadians of the 20th Century.

There are eight essays by eight authors in this short academic
collection, but each makes one point loudly and clearly: developing
nations must upgrade their protection of intellectual property rights
immediately if they hope to participate fully in the increasingly
globalized economy. This is not a particularly new message, nor is it
offered in a particularly new way. The reason for this is likely that
the papers in this collection are the product of two conferences in
South America in late 1999 presented by the conservative think tank, The
Fraser Institute, and politics as much as research seem to animate the
authors.

The subject of intellectual property rights in the developing world is
clearly a vital economic issue as global investment becomes ever more
heedless of national borders, and the Canadian- and American-based
authors perform a useful service by sketching the issues that have kept
governments in developing countries from signing on to a strict legal
regime of intellectual property protection. But conspicuous by its
absence here is any contrary viewpoint that would explain—especially
from the perspective of the developing nations themselves—why it is
that developed world models of intellectual property rights have not
traditionally made sense to those on the other side of the fence.