During the cold war with the Soviet Union, Western governments had enough on their hands dealing with the military and diplomatic balance of power. They knew that putting intellectual property on steroids would only weaken their hand at negotiations for normalising intellectual property relations between East and West. So they tempered their legislation, so as not to appear like totally corrupt and Bourgois, laissez-faire capitalists, and lose the ideological argument with the African, South East Asian and South American client states.

Now that the cold war is a fading memory, and the former Soviet republics and their client states are part of the capitalist club; now that generic drugs have been accepted as part of the legitimate development picture for developing nations like India and Brazil; the patent attorneys, lawyers and politicians need something else to keep them busy. There’s basically nothing holding them back from this nonsense, because there’s no big corporation asking them to stop the patent absurdity. There are just little guys here and there, long-haired prophets in the wilderness whose voices are being drowned out by the capitalist establishment. We have been fed the Western doctrine, that research and development are the finest products of high civilisation, and that intellectual property “theft” (or whatever is being framed as such) is something that uncivilised nations do, something that is holding back the whole world… That intellectual property law needs to be “strengthened” ad infinitim, until intellectual property infringement stops altogether (which will spur our economy on to greater heights, because infringement was always the problem).

At least, this is my personal understanding of why we’ve seen a sudden up-tick in the activities of militant intellectual property legislators + litigators, since the early 1990′s.

We definitely need intellectual property law; but criminalising patent infringement is not the answer. I think the real answer for holders of genuine patents is to purchase insurance to cover the legal contingencies of defending their inventions. Alternatively, governments might consider providing legal aid through chambers of commerce, to legitimate small inventors and innovative start-up companies; where fighting such cases is deemed to be in the national interest (such aid might even be organised to pay for itself, and to act as an investment trust).

Criminalising accidental infringement? No thanks. Criminalising a person who steps on a mine, within a minefield that has been deliberately designed so that it covers all the available land and so that nobody can move inside its perimeter without stepping on a mine? Madness.