Australia’s stance in IP negotiations: ‘That didn’t work, let’s do it again.’
Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a differentresult is meant to be one definition of insanity. It’s also a pretty
good definition of poor policymaking. Another sign of really ordinary
policymaking is doing the same thing over and over without ever
assessing whether it actually works as promised. Sorry to say, I’ve just
described Australia’s approach to negotiating the intellectual property
chapters in free-trade agreements. These chapters set rules relating to
copyright, patent, trade mark, including how copyright gets enforced
online and for how long, and how we balance incentives for
pharmaceutical development with questions of access to medicine.
The Australia-US Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA) turned 10 this year. A
perfect opportunity, you would think, to assess the successes and
failures of past agreements, like AUSFTA. Did we get it right? Could we
do better? Before we do the same again, have any problems emerged of
which we should be careful?
