Page 369 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| P racy and Intellectual Property

the interests of individuals’ creative cultural expressions, such protections are
designed to help the information and media industries maintain and expand
markets.

ThE gLoBaL ExPansion oF iP ProTECTion

IP laws were for the most part developed by the United States and Western
European nations under pressure from private industries seeking to protect cur-
rent interests and create new fields for safe investment. The range of IP pro-
tections has been expanded sporadically since the eighteenth century to cover
more forms of ideas and expressions for longer periods of time over a larger geo-
graphic area. But the international standardization and global implementation
of national IP laws has only been achieved more recently through high-pressure
trade negotiations dominated by a U.S.-led coalition of economically and politi-
cally powerful countries, who were in turn influenced by intense lobbying from
multinational corporations heavily invested in knowledge-based industries such
as the media.
Thus, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)—established
in 1967 to “promote the protection of intellectual property throughout the
world”—was bypassed by the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intel-
lectual Property (TRIPS) in 1994, and the WTO became the de facto govern-
ing body for international IP rights. All WTO member states must sign on to
TRIPS, which requires that they enact IP laws modeled largely on those of the
United States and European nations that were formed to protect the interests of
private industries.
This has allowed multinational corporations to expand into developing na-
tions under legal protection from the government, where they create new mar-
kets for previously acquired IPs and use their economic muscle to acquire new
IPs for other markets. Not only does this give them an unfair advantage over
local producers of valuable IPs, but also gives the multinationals a great deal of
control over the circulation of cultural expressions in the public domain. For
these reasons, many argue that the global growth of media piracy is a response
to the simultaneous expansion of media markets and IP protections that greatly
increase the availability of creative cultural expressions while severely delimiting
how people can engage with them.

see also Branding the Globe; Communication Rights in a Global Context;
Digital Divide; Google Book Search; Hypercommercialism; Innovation and
Imitation in Commercial Media; Internet and Its Radical Potential; The
iTunes Effect; Media Reform; Net Neutrality; Online Digital Film and Televi-
sion; Online Publishing; Pirate Radio; User-Created Content and Audience
Participation.

Further reading: Bettig, Ronald V. Copyrighting Culture: The Political Economy of Intel-
lectual Property. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996; Cook, Curtis. Patents, Profits, &
Power: How Intellectual Property Rules the Global Economy. London: Kogan Page, Ltd,