Technology "theft" is a myth

Jurassic World Rebirth has an important moral lesson: technology should be shared, not protected

Photo by Fausto García-Menéndez on Unsplash

Spoiler alert for Jurassic World Rebirth.

I recently went to the cinema to watch Jurassic World Rebirth, the seventh installment in the Jurassic Park franchise. I really enjoyed it. It’s packed with thrilling action and spectacular dinosaurs, and mostly avoids cringy punchlines by the protagonists. It also features a fascinating story about intellectual property. The core mission of the "team"—there tends to be a team mission in the Jurassic Park films—is to extract blood samples from long-living dinosaurs in order to make a life-enhancing drug for humans. The team members with a corporate bent unsurprisingly want to patent this drug in order to profit from it. But the paleontologist, Dr. Henry Loomis, wants to make the drug open-source so that the entire world can benefit from it.

In the end, Dr. Loomis gets his way. After several nerve-wracking encounters with dinosaurs, the team extracts all the blood samples they need. The drug becomes distributed without a patent, open-source for the entire planet. That's how the film ends. It helps, of course, that the team's greedy pharma executive is eaten by a Distortus Rex (a mutated Tyrannosaurus rex).

What a fantastic ending. Sadly, this kind of ending is only fiction for now. In the real world, technology and intellectual property are strongly protected rather than shared globally. Most international trade agreements actively prevent the free flow of intellectual property and technology across borders. In fact, lower-income countries regularly face accusations of "technology theft" from high-income countries. For example, China has throughout its economic development period regularly faced accusations by the United States of intellectual property infringement.

If we want a world of shared prosperity, this way of thinking needs a radical overhaul. The idea that lower-income countries "steal" technology from high-income countries is actually absurd in many ways.

Let me explain. In a capitalist economy, the rationale behind protecting intellectual property is that it incentivizes innovation (through the profit motive). This view is problematic because there are numerous examples of innovation occurring without a profit motive—such as the polio vaccine, the internet, the printing press, and the list goes on. But even if we accept the view that we need patents and intellectual property protection to incentivize innovation, we face a huge international development problem: high-income countries file a lot more patents and profit more from these than lower-income countries. Stronger protection of intellectual property therefore drives global inequality between countries.

In fact, knowledge monopolies and protection of intellectual property among powerful transnational corporations based in high-income countries are driving intense concentration of corporate wealth and power, thereby holding back economic development in lower-income countries. A recent paper by Cedric Durand and William Milberg gets this point across forcefully. They find a tremendous increase in international income generated by intellectual property rights from the 1980s to the 2010s, going almost entirely to high-income countries (dominated by the United States). In 1980, the income generated from international payments related to the use of intellectual property was fairly equal across the world. In 2016, this income was a hundred times higher in high-income countries than in low- and middle-income countries (US$323 billion versus US$3 billion).

We should also recognize that transnational corporations in high-income countries—the main beneficiaries of patents—are completely reliant on labor and production systems in lower-income countries to generate profits. For example, the innovation and windfall profits of the US technology industry would not be possible without labor from and in countries like China and India. In fact, the above-mentioned paper by Durand and Milberg explicitly highlights that large US-based technology firms rake in massive profits primarily because they take advantage of their power in the world economy, rather than because they innovate. If anything, high-income countries owe lower-income countries massive amounts of technology due to taking advantage of their labor and skills.

We need to consider the international development dimension more strongly. Technological development is part and parcel of economic development. In the process of development, lower-income countries rely on some technology transfer from high-income countries. If we want a world of shared prosperity, we would create rules that enable global distribution of intellectual property and technology. Currently, our rules-based order does the opposite—it prevents technology from being distributed widely. It's a good thing when technology is transferred from a wealthier part of the world to a poorer part of the world. It's absurd that we call it "theft." I'm sure the paleontologist, Dr. Henry Loomis, would agree.