Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Indeed. There was an understanding at the time that ideas were no one's property. Rather, they were an accumulation of generations of developments and advancements in knowledge. Everyone was standing on the shoulders of everyone else in the development of ideas, literature, innovation, etc. That is the truth.

I do not know whether my next point is absolutely true, but I remember reading an article that claimed that the Windows system, a revolution in computer technology, was not developed by Bill Gates and Microsoft, but by a person in Xerox who did not take out a patent. Someone else patented it instead. Whoever developed Windows was standing on the shoulders of those who had come before him and had advanced our knowledge, understanding, experience, ideas, science and technology.

The idea that one can parcel intellectual property as a commodity that is owned by someone is a major problem. The serious implications of this are evident in terms of generic medicines, where companies told people dying of AIDS that, unless they paid a price assigned by the companies to their life-saving "intellectual property", then it was a case of tough luck.

While I accept that the Bill is moving a little in the direction of challenging this stance, it does not go far enough, given the stranglehold that large corporations seem to have on ideas that they claim are their private property when it is highly debatable that those ideas are instead the accumulation and advancement of human knowledge, science and technology. This might seem philosophical, but it translates on a day-to-day economic level into the restrictions placed on people when innovating and pushing the boundaries of knowledge by the claim by the companies concerned that the ideas are their property and cannot be touched or researched, otherwise they will sue. The trend of corporatisation and commodification of intellectual property and ideas to the benefit of large corporations at the expense of society and pushing the boundaries of science, technology and knowledge is a matter of concern.

Worryingly, another sector relevant to this discussion is that of food, where genetic modification poses potential dangers.

Essentially, companies are trying to force countries and regions to become dependent on particular genetically-modified food and then gain a monopoly in the production of that food at the expense of people being able to do those things themselves or to produce their own sustainable food supply. These are important issues that in some ways I am surprised have not been considered in a Bill that deals with intellectual property. In particular, I refer to the area of the patent box and how Members will define intellectual property for the purposes of assigning value and profits and so on to make sure it is not simply another tax avoidance scheme by major multinationals.

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