The Global North Lives Off Intellectual Rents: The Twenty-Sixth Newsletter (2025)
Despite rapid technological innovations, Global South countries remain trapped in Global North-dominated intellectual property regimes designed to extract endless rents through patents and licensing fees– stripping them of wealth and stunting their development.
Despite the growing technological and industrial capacity of countries in the Global South, countries and corporations in the Global North continue to own intellectual property patents on key products, locking the South into indefinite patent payment regimes. These include patent payments for pharmaceuticals, digital technologies (such as licensing fees for software and telecommunications infrastructure), and agricultural goods (such as genetically modified seeds, fertilisers, pesticides, and equipment). Scientific and technological advances have indeed accelerated in the Global South, with several countries – particularly in Asia – developing sophisticated high-speed rail, green technologies, and telecommunications infrastructure. Yet even in these sectors, most countries continue to pay large rents to Global North firms that own patents on key components.
There are five sectors where the imbalance in patent-related payments is most severe (in other words, where Global South countries pay significantly more in royalties and licensing fees than they receive in return):
- Pharmaceuticals. Drug patents are largely owned by firms based in Europe, Japan, and the United States. A recent example of the high price of access to essential medical technologies was the cost of importing mRNA vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Several countries in the Global South, such as South Africa and India, faced delays and inflated costs in vaccine procurement due to patent restrictions and limited technology transfer. (South Africa eventually opted to purchase vaccines from India’s generic producers – such as Cipla and the Serum Institute – which saved the country approximately $133 million over three years.)
- Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Every component of ICTs – from software and hardware to semiconductors and mobile networks – costs Global South countries a king’s ransom. This is not only because of the price of the physical products themselves, but also because of the high licensing fees for the underlying technologies, which are often controlled by exclusive patent pools (consortia of firms that jointly manage and license essential patents).
Read full article here: thetricontinental.org/newslett…
The Global North Lives Off Intellectual Rents: The Twenty-Sixth Newsletter (2025)
Despite rapid technological innovations, Global South countries remain trapped in Global North-dominated intellectual property regimes designed to extract endless rents through patents and licensing fees– stripping them of wealth and stunting their d…Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
relentless_eduardo
in reply to Meinhair • • •yadda, yadda, yadda