Joseph Stiglitz on the 'Locking up of knowledge'

"Making Globalization Work", the new work by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner for Economics in 2001, is about the drifting of globalization. The author explains to Christian Losson why intellectual property rights are "among the worst mistakes of current capitalism. Because it is a question of life or death, as has been seen in the struggle for low-cost medicine. Men or patents? The initial error was to have left to finance ministers and multinationals the task of crafting 'trips' [trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights] in 1994. Intellectual property has been integrated into commerce, not into the environment and not into work norms either. ... Free access to knowledge - the defenders of open architecture, such as Linux or Mozilla know this- is world-wide public property! A moral obligation."

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