I would suggest the book: Steal this Idea: the Corporate Confiscation of Creativity by Michael Perelman, as it covers the extent to which Pharma is subsidized by government, and also it’s profit seeking behavior has caused good treatments to be suppressed.

I would think that more people would be angry about this.

Is that a criticism?

To hear more outrageous and similar unrelated to trade provisions in treaties, I would suggest looking at John Perkin’s book “Confessions of an Economic Hitman.”

In Ecuador, rich with hydro-electric power, it was mandated by the treaty that Ecuadorians would pay “world competitive rates” (or some other similar term) despite the fact that their incomes were very low.

And some Americans wonder why we are so hated through much of the third world…?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man

And that’s not even taking into account the distorting effect of patents when it comes to “me, too” drugs (tweaking existing drugs just enough to repatent them, which is a form of low-hanging fruit artificially created by the patent system).

Thanks for the comment. I’ll have to defer to your superior familiarity of the specifics of these agreements for the precise statistics. But I think my broader point, that these trade agreements are larded up with provisions that have little to do with trade or with “theft,” is still valid. For example, skimming the relevant sections of the US-Korea treaty, there are terms requiring South Korea to lengthen copyright terms, enact DMCA-style anti-circumvention rules (this requirement goes on for 3 pages), prohibit the removal of “rights management information,” and prohibit re-transmission of television signals on the Internet without separate copyright authorization. There are similarly convoluted rules regarding patents, trademarks, and domain name dispute resolution.

Now, reasonable people can disagree about whether any of these provisions are good public policy. But they have nothing to do with “free trade” as that term would have been understood by Adam Smith. If, for example, South Korea were to adopt a bad system of domain name dispute resolution, that might be a serious problem. It might even be something to sign a treaty about. But it’s not a trade barrier, and there’s no good reason for it to be in a free trade agreement. By shoving all of these unrelated issues into these “free trade” agreements, the administration has been effectively hijacking the good name of free trade to serve the agenda of politically connected interest groups here in the the United States. I don’t think that’s appropriate, and I think free traders, in particular, should be vigilant about this kind of rent-seeking lest the good name of free trade be sullied.

I also cannot agree with the following claim: “If you look at actual trade agreements, you find that most of the “intellectual property” provisions have little to do with preventing “theft” of copyrights and patents and more to do with coercing other countries to adopt our particular copyright rules. For example, many recent “free trade” agreements have included provisions requiring our trading partners to enact laws analogous to the DMCA.” I have looked at actual trade agreements, and they do not seem to support this claim.

For example, by my rough count, the IPR Chapter of the US-Bahrain FTA contains about 88 agreements related to the protection of intellectual property rights. 15 of those 88 agreements relate specifically to copyrights, related rights, or both. 2 of those 88 agreements relate more specifically to DMCA-like protections. (The count rises to 3 if the DMCA’s limitations on the potential infringement liability of ISPs count as “bad policy for the United States.”). The FTA also contains 15 agreements relating to trademarks and domain names, and 15 related to patents and data-protection. The remaining 43 agreements relate more generally to matters like enforcement, border protections, etc.—measures that often do deal rather directly with efforts to “prevent ‘theft’ of copyrights and patents.” In short, copyright generally and the DMCA in particular, look more like an important, but not dominant, component of the IPR-related provisions of the US-Bahrain FTA.

More generally, I do not see anything particularly unusual about the idea that substantive harmonization of intellectual property protections can facilitate protection of the rights themselves and promote trade. Those ideas seem to underlie even 19th Century agreements like the Berne and Paris Conventions.

I’ll have to take a bye for now on your comments related more specifically to pharmaceutals and patents: I agree with some of your points and disagree with others, but those issues bear more discussion than I can fairly give them at the moment. –Tom