By Andre Griffith
With the start of the new school year, the issue of intellectual property is again receiving attention with the widespread pirating of textbooks. In addition to the seasonal appearance of the textbook issue, readers would probably be familiar with the concerns of musical performing artists who are a vocal interest group locally for intellectual property rights. Intellectual property however has implications for a wide range of pursuits which may not be readily apparent to casual observers. There are however many examples of the need for IP protection. Some acquaintances of mine, on a recent trip to the Far East, told of the open availability of knockoff designer label apparel. On the local scene, I have noticed that in the recent past, there seems to be a proliferation of local fashion designers and those that aspire to making a living from this pursuit must of necessity be interested in the intellectual property framework.
Manufacturers such as DDL, Banks DIH and (The New) GPC to name a few have a natural interest in practices surrounding protection of formulae, brands and trademarks. I was surprised many years ago in Canada to see “Demerara Sugar” originating from countries all over the world (with the exception of Guyana). I was later to learn, while in the employ of the Guyana Sugar Corporation that Guyana had been unsuccessful in gaining the rights to the Demerara Sugar brand, and the ruling was something to the effect that “Demerara” applied to the manufacturing process (pioneered right here in Guyana) rather than to the product itself. In recent researches into the origins of single malt whiskies however, I learnt that quite the opposite to the Demerara Sugar case, one cannot use the appellation “Scotch” whisky unless the product originates in Scotland. The difference in these two cases perhaps can intuitively go some way toward explaining our instinctive distrust of and discomfort with the current draft EPA agreements.
The foregoing should serve to convince readers of the importance and widespread implications of intellectual property in general. Thus armed with an appreciation of the wider issues, we to turn to intellectual property in relation to information technologies in particular. IPissues in relation to information technology are usually associated with software, although there are other less common practices related to hardware and firmware piracy and black marketing. One example of these I recall from many years ago is the discovery of a batch of computers procured for an entity purportedly containing Intel processors but which were in fact found to contain processors manufactured by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). In my opinion, the AMD processors were just as good as their Intel equivalents (arguably better), however the difference was that the Intel brand commanded a higher price, which could have been avoided had the true origin of the processors been stated. This was in my opinion outright fraud, the perpetrators of which should have been prosecuted. Pirating of software is arguably extremely widespread and this is regrettable since individuals, businesses and the country as a whole all lose in some way or another from this pernicious practice.
Individual IT practitioners
IT practitioners stand to lose from pirating of software in a number of ways. The first disadvantage is simply that this practice significantly contributes to the lack of appreciation for the true cost of computer software. For individuals wishing to become independent software developers, this lack of appreciation ensures that the perceived value of computer software that they develop will generally be a fraction of the true value rendering software development a less than satisfactory economic and business pursuit. In the case of IT staff employed by public and private sector organisations, the value of the assets entrusted to their care is again not truly appreciated, and it seems not to be realised by those very IT practitioners that this lack of appreciation for the true cost of information systems impacts in a very real way on their careers. Consider a typical medium sized organisation with a network of 30-40 machines running a standard set of applications, accounting, payroll, etc.
IT practitioners ought to put themselves in the shoes of business owners and then ask themselves the question whether they will pay more to the manager of a factory containing probably 50M or more in equipment, or to the person who operates the network of which the only cost that is seen is probably 6M or so for the hardware (if bought retail). With the operating systems, accounting systems, email, antivirus etc all pirated, (and maybe the payroll developed at a knockdown price by a local), not only is the true acquisition cost of this system a fraction of its real value, it will probably perform poorly since the access to the manufacturer’s support for upgrades, updates is not possible.
Businesses – The poor performance of the pirated systems impacts on the efficiency of businesses. It is probably impossible to have high availability systems assembled from pirated software, added to which “knockoff” hardware such as computers falsely bearing the better known brands will generally perform less efficiently and exhibit a shorter useful lifetime than the brands they purport to be (this should not be confused with the brand issue relating to the processor that was referred to above, where the substitute cannot be argued to be of inferior quality, however the action remains fraudulent).
The country – Nationally, we suffer on a number of fronts. Our stance of intellectual property may essentially be interpreted to be a rationalisation that some forms of theft are less unacceptable than others. People are incarcerated for stealing items such as coconuts and sugar cane. I am willing to wager that businesses that prosecute employees or members of the public for shoplifting are among those that blithely use software products without paying for them. This is a sort of national schizophrenia in relation to criminal activity that we must confront in some manner.
Apart from the cognitive dissonance that software piracy and other intellectual property theft creates with respect to our values on criminal activity, there is a real economic cost which is that a potentially lucrative sphere of economic activity is inhibited by the lack of a modern framework for intellectual property rights and the capacity for their enforcement. A senior IT professional whose view I respect once pointed to the example of India, and expressed the view that India’s development of capacity in the field of Information Technology was facilitated by less than rigorous approach to intellectual property.
In disagreeing with him, my view was and is that where the (allegedly) lenient stance on IP (may have) worked for India, our situation is such that a lax stance would have the opposite effect. India possessed a relatively strong internal market which is often-times overlooked in evaluating their IT miracle. Such a market is substantially absent in our case. We therefore have to look outwards for markets from the inception and our small size means that we must compete in niches or by differentiation (reputation/brand etc.) rather than on price. From this standpoint, our success in traditional business activities relies even more than Information Technology on a sound intellectual property framework. Remember Demerara Sugar!
