ABSTRACT
This chapter expresses that property rights have important effects on innovation. They can be positive, as with patents motivating pharmaceutical innovation. Feudalism was a system of property rights that discouraged innovation by denying property rights to most of the population who were chattels of a smaller property-owning class. The negative effects of information feudalism have involved intellectual property rights being deployed to lock up knowledge from competitors who might use it. The chapter explores how the conditions of representation, information and non-domination have not been met in the development of the global intellectual property regime over the past two decades. It focuses on the role of coercion in persuading importers of intellectual property rights to sign an agreement that dramatically increased the costs of intellectual property imports to them. The globalization of the US intellectual property regime requires a structural grasp of economic interests and an understanding of entrepreneurship in ideas by individuals who knew how to harness structural power.
