Many of us who support free trade and private property rights tend to look favorably on regional and bilateral treaties that claim to further these goals. There is a vast network of bilateral investment treaties, or BITs, for example, designed to promote foreign direct investment by Western firms into developing nations by limiting the host state’s ability to expropriate the investments.

These BITs aim to strengthen the property rights of international investors in the host state so as to make investment less risky. There are more than 2,500 BITs in force worldwide; the US itself currently has BITs in place with 39 countries. BITs and other measures can benefit both host states and international investors by strengthening local property rights, as I explain in International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution.

In addition to investment treaties that concern the property rights of foreign investors in host countries, there is also a global network of bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements ostensibly aimed at promoting trade between nations. Many of us favored so-called free trade agreements like NAFTA even if we would have preferred more radical approaches. Regional, multilateral, and bilateral trade agreements are viewed as incremental improvements even if thousands of pages of regulations could be easily replaced by a couple of sentences or, better, unilateral abolition of import tariffs.

But over time it has become apparent that “free trade” agreements often serve as a pretext for exporting Western intellectual property (IP) law—mainly US-style patent and copyright law—onto the rest of the world. This is what I call IP imperialism. Here’s how it works. First, we are told that intellectual property rights are legitimate, and in fact are part of the reason for the relative success of the industrialized countries in the West. (It’s not. For more on this, see You Can’t Own Ideas: Essays on Intellectual Property.)

Next, developing countries are chided for not having strong IP law enforcement. They are even accused of “stealing” know-how and technology from Western capitalist firms as if there is something wrong with manufacturers in a developing country using the most efficient known production techniques.

Finally, the West, primarily the US, uses its leverage to pressure developing nations to adopt and strengthen IP protections and adopt international IP treaties, primarily for the benefit of US corporate interests, namely pharmaceuticals (patent) and Hollywood and music (copyright). This has led to various IP treaties on copyright, patent, trademark, and so on, which most states and the world are party to (including China, Russia, North Korea, and so on) and which require member states to protect IP in their national legislation. And there is continual agitation by the Western powers to add even more IP........

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