Intellectual property rights, moral imagination, and access to life-enhancing drugs

Although the idea of intellectual property (IP) rights--proprietary rights to what one invents, writes, paints, composes or creates--is firmly embedded in Western thinking, these rights are now being challenged across the globe in a number of areas. This paper will focus on one of those challenges: government-sanctioned copying of patented drugs without permission or license of the patent owner in the name of national security, in health emergencies, or life-threatening epidemics. After discussing standard rights-based and utilitarian arguments defending intellectual property we will present another model. IP is almost always a result of a long history of of scientific or technological development and numbers of networks of creativity, not the act of a single person or a group of people at one moment in time. Thus thinking about and evaluating IP requires a traditional model of IP. It follows that the owner of those rights has some obligations to share that information or its outcomes. If that conclusion is applied to the distribution of antiretroviral drugs, what pharmaceutical companies are ethically required to do to increase access to these medicines in the developing world will have to be reanalyzed from a more systemic perspective.