Intellectual Property and the Preferential Option for the Poor

I've posted on SSRN this paper, arising out of Villanova's fine conference last fall on The Meaning of the Preferential Option for the Poor for Law and Policy.  Here's part of the the abstract:

IP lies at the heart of debates over globalization and whether it is working to help poor nations or to impose new costs on them while increasing the wealthy nations' relative advantages. The Catholic Church has weighed in on these issues, most clearly in favor of limiting patent rights over essential medicines for combating AIDS and other epidemics. . . .

. . . Intellectual property, like other forms of property, serves important purposes related to human dignity, productivity, and (especially) creativity, and Catholic teaching therefore affirms it. But for a variety of reasons, limits on intellectual property are equally important: the full extension of IP rights may harm the poor, and certain limits on those rights are important to benefiting and empowering the poor. In particular, certain existing or proposed limits on IP rights can resonate with Catholic concepts such as maintenance of the common good and the importance of subsidiary organizations defined neither by the state nor by the market. And expressions of skepticism in Catholic thought about bureaucratic approaches to the poor reflected in the social assistance state have relatively little application to the kind of limits on IP rights that may be adopted to empower the poor.

Tom