Another Threat to Intellectual Property and Our Future
One of the first acts of Congress in the young U.S.A. was to pass the Patent Act of 1790, which was quickly signed into law by President George Washington on April 10, 1790. It was universally understood that to make progress in the industrial revolution, a patent system was necessary to promote innovation and entrepreneurship. On July 31, 1790, President Washington as the nation’s patent officer signed the first U.S. patent to Samuel Hopkins for an improvement in “the making of Pot ash and Pearl ash by a new Apparatus and Process.” Signaling the importance of patents, Attorney General Edmund Randolph and Secretory of State Thomas Jefferson co-signed the document. There can be no doubt that the founding fathers felt strongly that protecting intellectual property via patents was crucial in promoting improvements in this new nation. The only President to hold a patent was Abraham Lincoln. On May 22, 1849, he was granted patent number 6469 for a device to lift boats over shallow waters.
Fast forward 230 years since Washington to 2020 during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic to a raging debate at the World Trade Organization (WTO), part of the United Nations. Many nations support India and South Africa, encouraged by China, to abrogate respect for intellectual property and patents, this under the guise of supplying antiviral vaccines to poorer underdeveloped nations. The United States, Great Britain and the European Union are against it. They see this drive to abrogate patent rights by these nations as nothing more than an attempt to obtain critical process information at no cost to enhance their production of many drugs.
This push by India, South Africa and China under the pretext of helping poor nations is disingenuous. As with the AIDS crisis, drug companies’ prices in developing countries were a fraction of their western counter parts. The same has been promised with anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. As an example, AstraZeneca has promised not to make any profit on the vaccine while the pandemic lasts. The WTO already has rules in place that the least developed countries are exempt from many patent obligations. There also exists “COVAX”, A WTO subsidary to accelerate the development and manufacture of COVID-19 vaccines and to enhance distribution to the underprivileged. Thus, there is NO need to tamper with the present patent system.
Protection of the patent system is vital for man’s progress. It is astonishing that the WTO has not contested China’s stealing of intellectual property for years. The present attempt by the WTO is another example of a United Nation’s agency doing the bidding of China and a few other nations against the interests of the West and the rest of mankind.
Thank you, Ken. You bring up a very important point. China is a nation with leadership that completely lacks a moral compass. We must not let them inflict their idea of “business ethics” on the world. They are shameless thieves. We can start by not letting them steal our intellectual property to any greater degree than they already do.
If I ever have occasion to travel to China and they decide to deport me after arrival due to this and various negative things I have written about their ethically void leadership, I would consider it to be a badge of honor.
Here is a story that illustrates the degree of control their government exerts against truth and freedom. My son, when a student at the U of Wisconsin during the prior decade, had a Chinese roommate from Bejing, also born in 1990. When the subject of the June 4, 1989 Tianenmen Square massacre came up, “Richard”, the roommate, had never heard of it, despite living less than 3 km from the site! He asserted that my son was making it all up. It’s as if their Ministry of Truth had erased the event from Chinese history, or attempted to.
When my son showed “Richard” the incontrovertible truth, the photos from the protest and the massacre, that young Chinese student learned an important lesson.
China has enacted changes that no longer limit their supreme leader to 10 year terms in office. That is an unmistakable tilt toward a totalitarian state where one group and only one group’s views are held to be reasonable. There is no room for dissent.
Anything we can do to help disable that society’s accumulation of wealth or influence is a good thing. We are not in a shooting war with China, but they are making war on us in the economic realm.