Protect or Plunder: Understanding Intellectual Property Rights (Global Issues)

New
Paperback
2001
$30.99

Intellectual property rights, TRIPS, patents - they sound technical, even boring. Yet what kinds of ideas, technologies, identification of genes, even manipulations of life forms can be owned and exploited for profit by giant corporations is a vital issue for our times. Vandana Shiva shows how the Western-inspired and unprecedented widening of the concept of intellectual poperty does not in fact stimulate human creativity and the generation of knowledge. Instead, it is being exploited by transnational corporations to increase their profits at the expense of the health of ordinary people especially the poor, and the age-old knowledge of the world's farmers. Intellectual protection is being transformed into corporate plunder. Little wonder popular resistance is rising around the world to the World Trade Organization, that polices this new intellectual world order, the pharmaceutical, biotech and other corporations which dominate it, and the new technologies they are foisting upon us.

Synopsis

Intellectual property rights, TRIPS, patents - they sound technical, even boring. Yet what kinds of ideas, technologies, identification of genes, even manipulations of life forms can be owned and exploited for profit by giant corporations is a vital issue for our times. Vandana Shiva shows how the Western-inspired and unprecedented widening of the concept of intellectual poperty does not in fact stimulate human creativity and the generation of knowledge. Instead, it is being exploited by transnational corporations to increase their profits at the expense of the health of ordinary people especially the poor, and the age-old knowledge of the world's farmers. Intellectual protection is being transformed into corporate plunder. Little wonder popular resistance is rising around the world to the World Trade Organization, that polices this new intellectual world order, the pharmaceutical, biotech and other corporations which dominate it, and the new technologies they are foisting upon us.

$30.99

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 144
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd
Published: 01 Nov 2001
ISBN 10: 1842771094
ISBN 13: 9781842771099
Book Overview: Recipient of the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize (the Right Livelihood Award) and of the Earth Day Award

Media Reviews

One of the world's most prominent radical scientists.' The Guardian 'The South's best known environmentalist.' New Internationalist 'Vandana Shiva is a leading physicist who abandoned an exciting career in her country's nuclear energy programme because she felt .... that arrogant late 20th century science now poses such a threat to the web of life (of which we are merely a part) that a committed scientist should take the side of Nature against further artifice and destruction.' The Observer 'Vandana Shiva is a burst of creative energy and intellectual power.' The Progressive

Author Bio

Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental thinker and campaigner. A former physicist, feminist and philosopher, she is prominent in citizens' actions against environmental destruction, and critical of the latest agricultural and genetic engineering technologies and the giant corporations which control them. A leader in the International Forum on Globalization along with Ralph Nader and Jeremy Rifkin, Vandana Shiva won the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize (the Right Livelihood Award) in 1993.