To deal with the climate crisis we need a new paradigm of technological and social development aimed at the restoration of ecological systems--the bio-digital energy paradigm--and China is the world power best positioned to lead this change. The climate and energy crisis requires a strong state to change the direction, speed, and scale of innovation in world capitalism. There are only a few possible contenders for catalyzing this governance of survival: China, the European Union, India, and the United States. While China is an improbable leader--and in fact the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gasses--Peter Drahos explains in Survival Governance why this authoritarian state is actually more likely to implement systemic change swiftly and effectively than any other power. Drawing on more than 250 interviews, carried out in 17 countries--including the world's four largest carbon emitters--Drahos shows what China is doing to make its vast urban network sustainable and why all states must work toward a "bio-digital energy paradigm" based on a globalized, city-based network of innovation. As Drahos explains, America is incapable of reducing the power of its fossil fuel industry. For its part, the European Union's approach is too incremental and slowed by complex internal negotiations to address a crisis that demands a rapid response. India's capacity to be a global leader on energy innovation is questionable. To be sure, China faces hurdles too. Its coal-based industrial system is enormous, and the US, worried about losing technological superiority, is trying to slow China's development. Even so, China is currently urbanizing innovation on a historically unprecedented scale, building eco-cities, hydrogen cities, forest cities, and sponge cities (designed to cope with flooding). This has the potential to move cities into a new relationship with their surrounding ecosystems. China--given the size of its economy and the central government's ability to dictate thoroughgoing policy change--is, despite all of its flaws, presently our best hope for implementing the sort of policy overhaul that can begin to slow climate change.

Survival Governance: Energy and Climate in the Chinese Century

Engineering & Transportation

Drahos, Peter

Engineering

Oxford University Press

Patent offices around the world have granted millions of patents to multinational companies. Patent offices are rarely studied and yet they are crucial agents in the global knowledge economy. Based on a study of forty-five rich and poor countries that takes in the world's largest and smallest offices, Peter Drahos argues that patent offices have become part of a globally integrated private governance network, which serves the interests of multinational companies, and that the Trilateral Offices of Europe, the USA and Japan make developing country patent offices part of the network through the strategic fostering of technocratic trust. By analysing the obligations of patent offices under the patent social contract and drawing on a theory of nodal governance, the author proposes innovative approaches to patent office administration that would allow developed and developing countries to recapture the public spirit of the patent social contract.

The Global Governance of Knowledge: Patent Offices and their Clients

Intellectual Property

Cambridge University Press

Patent offices around the world have granted millions of patents to multinational companies. Patent offices are rarely studied and yet they are crucial agents in the global knowledge economy. Based on a study of forty-five rich and poor countries that takes in the world's largest and smallest offices, Peter Drahos argues that patent offices have become part of a globally integrated private governance network, which serves the interests of multinational companies, and that the Trilateral Offices of Europe, the USA and Japan make developing country patent offices part of the network through the strategic fostering of technocratic trust. By analysing the obligations of patent offices under the patent social contract and drawing on a theory of nodal governance, the author proposes innovative approaches to patent office administration that would allow developed and developing countries to recapture the public spirit of the patent social contract.

Global Business Regulation

How has the regulation of business shifted from national to global institutions? What are the mechanisms of globalization? Who are the key actors? What of democratic sovereignty? In which cases has globalization been successfully resisted? These questions are confronted across an amazing sweep of the critical areas of business regulation--from contract, intellectual property and corporations law, to trade, telecommunications, labor standards, drugs, food, transport and environment. This book examines the role played by global institutions such as the World Trade Organization, World Health Organization, the OECD, IMF, Moodys and the World Bank, as well as various NGOs and significant individuals. Incorporating both history and analysis, Global Business Regulation will become the standard reference for readers in business, law, politics, and international relations.

Business & Money

Braithwaite, John

Economics

How has the regulation of business shifted from national to global institutions? What are the mechanisms of globalization? Who are the key actors? What of democratic sovereignty? In which cases has globalization been successfully resisted? These questions are confronted across an amazing sweep of the critical areas of business regulation--from contract, intellectual property and corporations law, to trade, telecommunications, labor standards, drugs, food, transport and environment. This book examines the role played by global institutions such as the World Trade Organization, World Health Organization, the OECD, IMF, Moodys and the World Bank, as well as various NGOs and significant individuals. Incorporating both history and analysis, Global Business Regulation will become the standard reference for readers in business, law, politics, and international relations.

Intellectual Property, Indigenous People and their Knowledge (Cambridge Intellectual Property and Information Law, Series Number 25)

After colonization, indigenous people faced an extractive property rights regime for both their land and knowledge. This book outlines that regime, and how the symbolic function of international intellectual property continues today to assist states to enclose indigenous peoples' knowledge. Drawing on more than 200 interviews, Peter Drahos examines the response of indigenous people to the colonizer's non-developmental property rights. The case studies reveal how they have adapted to the state's extractive order through a process of regulatory bricolage. In order to create a new developmental future for themselves, indigenous developmental networks have been forged - high trust networks that include partnerships with science. Intellectual Property, Indigenous People and their Knowledge argues for a developmental intellectual property order for indigenous people based on a combination of simple rules, principles and a process of regulatory convening.

Business

A Philosophy of Intellectual Property (Applied Legal Philosophy)

Are intellectual property rights like other property rights?  More and more of the world’s knowledge and information is under the control of intellectual property owners.  What are the justifications for this?  What are the implications for power and for justice of allowing this property form to range across social life?  Can we look to traditional property theory to supply the answers or do we need a new approach?  Intellectual property rights relate to abstract objects - objects like algorithms and DNA sequences.  The consequences of creating property rights in such objects are far reaching.  A Philosophy of Intellectual Property argues that lying at the heart of intellectual property are duty-bearing privileges.  We should adopt an instrumentalist approach to intellectual property and reject a proprietarian approach - an approach which emphasizes the connection between labour and property rights.  The analysis draws on the history of intellectual property, legal materials, the work of Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke, Marx and Hegel, as well as economic, sociological and legal theory.  The book is designed to be accessible to specialists in a number of fields as well as students.  It will interest philosophers, political scientists, economists, legal scholars as well as those professionals concerned with policy issues raised by modern technologies and the information society.

Reference

Routledge

Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy?

In a few short years, the battle over intellectual property rights has emerged from obscurity to become front-page news. The continent-hopping, three-year court battle fought by activists to bring cheap versions of desperately needed AIDS drugs to South Africa is but one example of how this seemingly arcane area of international regulation has become a crucial battleground in the twenty-first century and is animating activists the world over.
This powerful book is the definitive history of how the new global intellectual property regime—the rulebook for the knowledge economy—came to be. Drawing on more than five years of research and more than five hundred interviews with key figures—including negotiators for First and Third World countries, leaders of multinational corporations, and public-interest experts, Information Feudalism uncovers the story of how a small coterie of multinational corporations wrote the charter for the global information order.
Information Feudalism is an authoritative history of the demise of the world’s intellectual commons, and a potent call for democratic property rights.

Management & Leadership

The New Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Drahos, Peter. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Drahos, Peter

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Drahos, Peter. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Survival Governance: Energy and Climate in the Chinese Century

The Global Governance of Knowledge: Patent Offices and their Clients

The Global Governance of Knowledge: Patent Offices and their Clients

Global Business Regulation

Global Business Regulation

Intellectual Property, Indigenous People and their Knowledge (Cambridge Intellectual Property and Information Law, Series Number 25)

Intellectual Property, Indigenous People and their Knowledge (Cambridge Intellectual Property and Information Law, Series Number 25)

A Philosophy of Intellectual Property (Applied Legal Philosophy)

Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy?

Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy?