Social limits to the commodification of knowledge: ten years of TRIPs

This review article looks back at the first ten years of one of the most contentious elements of the global economy's new institutionalized governance regime. It examines the global political economy of protecting intellectual property, focusing on some key issues regarding the extension of such protection into the economies of developing countries, as discussed in three recent books. The review concludes that, for institutional economics, the problem of intellectual property is the problem of institutionalizing property rights writ large. As such, the problem of intellectual property in the global political economy can only be fully understood by establishing the historical and institutional context in which these rights are claimed.