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By Root 2058 0

too pointed out that the universal library would apparently be a monoculture, with all that that implied. (Several other projects to digitize and make available old books have in fact existed, and continue to do so, but none is remotely comparable to Google's in scale, nor as closely integrated into the dominant search technology)27 All these were good Enlightenment era points, made now in the context of twenty-first-century technologies. Moreover, this settlement-which, with its register system and its focus on one rather paternalist information channel, itself had a distinctly eighteenth-century air-left intact the problems that had led to its formulation. The challenge to copyright was deferred rather than defused.28

In the realm of patenting, the potentially transforming predicament had to do with pharmaceuticals. Certain countries-India, Brazil, and South Africa being the best known -had long called for prices on patented medicines to be lowered for life-and-death conditions. In the cases of Brazil and India, domestic industries existed that could produce generic equivalents. Brazil in particular pushed for compulsory licensing to allow them to do so. Compulsory licensing- that old idea of the Victorian antipatent campaigners -was in fact permitted under international trade accords in conditions of emergency. But the pharmaceutical industry remained staunchly opposed to it. The research that led to new drugs was undeniably costly-although exactly how costly is still a matter of much debate-and the industry's position was that an exclusive patents system was the best mechanism to underwrite it. The most plausible alternatives, prizes or Polanyi-style subsidies, seemed politically infeasible, although the former had proved effective in encouraging private ventures in other fields, notably spaceflight. The politics of this position would be complex enough alone, but it arose amid fears for the integrity of science in a realm ofproprietorial deals among corporate and academic institutions. At the same time campaigners for indigenous populations continued to level charges of biopiracy against developed-world enterprises. And with the agglomeration of "life sciences" companies in the 199os (since somewhat reversed), these issues became entwined with conflicts over seed piracy and genetically modified organisms in agriculture. The controversies surrounding the intellectual property defense industry were consequently more violent here than in any other field. Upholding the pharmaceutical patent system became an extraordinarily delicate task, by no means reducible to issues of intellectual property principle alone.Today, the tension between compulsory licensing and patents still seems particularly likely to rise to a climax. If that happens, it will stand to do for the principle of patenting what the mass-digitization projects may still do for the principle of copyright, the Google settlement notwithstanding.

It is therefore appropriate to end on a note of speculation. Intellectual property being a relatively recent concept, it ought to be possible to conceive of an alternative to it that suited the twenty-first century rather than the nineteenth. Suppose, therefore, that the two principal pillars of intellectual property-in effect, intellectual property itself-were to be challenged under these circumstances, and found wanting. What then?

Qualifications and alternatives to copyrights and patents have always existed: compulsory licenses, state subsidies, the provision of "bounties" by civil society, a system of informal courtesies, or even a completely laissez-faire regime. None of them has become consensual or normal, but none has completely vanished either. It is certainly possible that a solution to twenty-first-century problems could be cobbled together by combining them in some way with intellectual property as currently conceived. In principle, such ad hoc measures could be made to work indefinitely. (The war on drugs again comes to mind as unhappy evidence of that.) But it would seem a dauntingly confusing as well as