Interesting transcript of a talk by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz on Making Globalization Work <http://www.cceia.org/resources/transcripts/5397.html>. http://www.cceia.org/resources/transcripts/5397.html
Via techdirt http://techdirt.com/articles/20080421/024049903.shtml <http://techdirt.com/articles/20080421/024049903.shtml> "We've written about Stiglitz in the past, for his explanation of how patents often do more harm than good economically. In this speech, which is covering a much broader topic (globalization), he makes a few really good points about why what politicians put in place as "globalization" isn't matching what economists say should happen in a globalized economy... In particular, he points out how this is done with intellectual property. This is something we noted last year when we couldn't understand why a "free trade agreement" would guarantee monopolies on intellectual property. That seemed like the opposite of free trade. As Stiglitz notes: /"The Uruguay Round TRIPs Agreement, which is Trade-Related Intellectual Property, has nothing to do with trade. They just put "trade-related" because they had to put that in there to have it in a trade agreement. That was the real ingenuity... //they wanted the trade ministers to do it because the trade ministers didn't know anything about intellectual property, and that meant they were much more vulnerable to the influences of the special interests." /
