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Abstract

The world’s great free economies make great play of the importance of IP rights to their domestic prosperity. IP rights protect investment, create jobs, empower creators, facilitate the delivery of deliverables, enhance communication, and enrich the leisure and entertainment sectors. With the exception of minor political entities such as the anarchists, the extreme socialist left, and the Pirate Party—whose positions are consonant with a lower level of IP protection or even its abolition—there is general consensus among political leaders that IP is somehow a good thing. Since debate on IP protection does not split along party lines, it is unsurprising that the subject is rarely, if ever, raised in electoral manifestos or debated between political rivals. The absence of debate may be viewed as a good thing, but it is also a bad one. Since party leaders do not take issue with each other’s positions on patentability, parallel trade, peer-to-peer file sharing, or design poaching, there is never any real need for them to master the subjects. This is in sharp contrast with topics such as defence spending, development aid, and foreign policy, which impinge little if at all on the daily life of the voter, as well as subjects of more immediate relevance to the electorate such as the environment, education, and public health. Yet IP touches us all every day: the TV and radio programmes we consume to the food in our shops, the medicines in our bathroom cabinets, the downloads on our portable entertainment units, and even the clothes on our backs, IP is everywhere. Curiously, given the importance of IP and its pervasive quality, the subject is not only off the political agenda—it is almost kept shrouded from any sort of contemplation by the electoral community at large. Thus in the eyes of the governments of some of the world’s most open and democratic jurisdictions, and their main trading partners, IP enforcement is believed to be so sensitive an issue that it has been necessary to negotiate the terms of the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) behind closed doors, lest the momentum of the negotiations be stalled by public awareness.