Capturing ideas: Institutions, interests and intellectual property rights reform in India.

摘要

Existing theories of property rights often overlook politics, presenting functional explanations for existing property rights. In this dissertation, I develop a more complete political economy of property rights in the context of the intellectual property rights (IPR) reforms currently underway in India. Mine is a comparative study of Indian patent and copyright law reforms. Like many developing nations, India has faced international pressures to reform its IPRs. This is an issue of global importance, pushed to the forefront of international relations primarily by the U.S. government in the 1980s. The outcome of the Indian reforms are of global relevance since they may affect the outcome of this process internationally (India has been and continues to be a global leader regarding international IPR institutions). The IPR issue is also important in India and elsewhere in the developing world for normative reasons--global restructuring of IPRs along an American model will likely have adverse effects on the poor in developing countries. Prices paid by consumers for goods such as pharmaceuticals may increase dramatically as a result of the proposed patent law reforms.; In my conclusions, I support the New Institutionalists' central argument that "institutions matter." India's past intellectual property institutions gave rise to the various actors which subsequently contested these very institutions. Having examined the Indian pharmaceutical and software industries as the main domestic forces concerned with these reforms I find that the former opposed the internationally enjoined reforms and the latter supported them. Existing property rights institutions have also affected the political strength of competing agents by influencing their interest-group structures and imbuing agent claims with various degrees of legitimacy. In addition, I conclude that while business lobbies are increasingly influential forces in India, they are still overshadowed by the state. The state, however, is itself losing the ability it once had to plead India's case at international fora. Finally, I demonstrate that the dispute over IPR reform has helped transform the debate over the meaning of economic self-sufficiency in India towards a more globalist economic perspective. This transformation foreshadows the path of subsequent economic policy change in India.