Across the globe, politicians and pundits trumpet the knowledge economy, but few have ever bothered to examine with any rigor the success-to-failure ratio of national and international intellectual property law and regulations. Arguing that private and public interests are critically out of balance, Leonardo Burlamaqui advocates for a shakeout in the knowledge industries and creation of a new knowledge IP framework that he calls knowledge governance.
“What we see more and more is a redesigning of the frontier or the boundaries in between public interests – public domain – and private interests – private domain – in a way that private interests are getting more and more power in terms of appropriation of the fruits of knowledge,” states Burlamaqui.
As co-editor of Knowledge Governance, from Anthem Press, Burlamaqui and his colleagues seek to pull the balance of power closer to the public side. “Who funded those things in the very beginning? Well, the answer is public funding,” he tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally from his office at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. “If the public money was there in the very beginning, why not have some sort of mechanism that also makes a fair distribution of the returns, the profits? This is the backbone or the kernel, if you will, of this perspective that we call knowledge governance. It’s in opposition in a way to the whole idea of intellectual property.”
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