IP in Arsenal: Part 1

? Rahul Dutta | November 16, 2022 | 11th Issue

Art of war is of vital importance to the State: Sun Tzu

Introduction

Are wars won by sheer valour and skilled manpower? Even the wars waged by the US post World War 2 do not provide a clear answer. The reason for mentioning the US is two-fold. Firstly, post-World Wars US became a superpower in the world. Secondly, it has been a leader in both arsenal technology and arsenal production. This has created a deterrence effect amongst the nations thereby helping in establishing peace.

The biggest arsenal-importing countries India and Saudi Arabia have strategically decided to open their territories for defense sector manufacturing by the private sector. The objective is to become independent in defense preparedness.

In the contrasting background of the Indian Defence Expo held in October 2022 and the ongoing?UN Climate Change Conference (COP 27)?in Egypt, it is the right time to examine the defense.

The TRIPS Agreement may have created internationally harmonized IP laws, which, however, operate within the different government systems namely capitalist, socialist and communist systems. These different philosophies are reflected in the governance frameworks and concomitantly in their national IP laws.? arsenal vis-à-vis the cost of defending the political borders in the name of public welfare.

Innovation is a part of knowledge. It can have multiple dimensions and cannot be captured in totality by IP tools. This may be illustrated through the statement of?Steve Morgan, Editor-in-Chief of,?The Cyber Crime Magazine, in his report,?Cyberwarfare in the C-Suit:

If it were measured as a country, then cybercrime – which is predicted to inflict damages totaling $ 6 trillion USD globally in 2021 – would be the world’s third-largest economy after the US and China.?

Cybercrime alone sustains the business of cybersecurity whose estimated global market size is $ 173.5 billion USD for the year 2022 alone?!!

Traditionally, wars have always been fought for land however, with time this too could change so could the tools for invasion.

War is Perpetual

Sun Tzu?was a military general who is believed to have lived between 544-496 B.C. in ancient China. He wrote?Art of War, a treatise on military tactics and warfare that is relevant even after twenty-five centuries. Being a General, Sun Tzu’s thought process was limited to warfare which was carried out under the jurisdiction of a sovereign state. The character of the sovereign state has changed in the last twenty-five centuries. So have the strategies of invasion. Invasion now has become subtle, refined, and highly complex often imperceptible. The objective for invasion has also changed from chattels, land, and property to capturing global infrastructure development, technology, and other economic interests. It is easier to invade weaker states. It is very often seen that global powers use chaos, political instability, and corruption for accomplishing their interests in economically weaker states without much hindrance.

Sophisticated Invasion

WTO integrated its member States' markets into one market. The developed world’s MNCs gained the most out of this favorable business environment. The developing countries turned into the backyard factories of the developed world. A by-product of this development was the pollution of groundwater in the decade, 1995-2005 resulting in the buying of water purifiers and bottled water becoming a norm. In the second decade, humans polluted another basic element critical to survival, air. With polluted air and water, it is obvious the population living in such an environment falls sick sooner and cut short their average life. The top 20 most polluted cities are depicted below:

None of these top polluted countries are in the developed world. The core of life is air and water. The highly polluted air and water are the?silent killers?for the people living in these countries. Has not life essential natural resource become life ending arsenal?

The top ten economies of the world are as follows:?

Excluding China and India, rest of the economies are developed economies. The position of China and India in this list is exceptional as 40% population of the world lives there. The price paid by China and India in becoming a part of the top 10 economies club is shown as follows:

Further, the major Green House Gases emission takes place in the following countries:

Even then,?IQair.com?shows the air quality over the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, and Korea in the following three maps. Ironically with the distinction of being the champions in greenhouse gases emission, in the developed world breathing is easy and conducive to the healthy sustenance of life.

The world map depicting the percentage of GDP shows the disparity between the rich and the poor countries.?

Africa continent is home to?17% world's population, 54 countries but it amounts to a barely $ 3 trillion USD economy. According to?a report by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP),?Africa is home to some?30 percent of the world’s mineral reserves,?eight percent of the world’s natural Gas,?and?12 percent of the world’s oil reserves.?The continent has?40 percent of the world’s gold?and?up to 90 percent of its chromium and platinum. The?largest reserves of cobalt, diamonds, platinum, and uranium?in the world are in Africa. It holds?65 percent of the world’s arable land?and?ten percent of the planet’s internal renewable freshwater?source. Despite rich natural resources, Africa is collectively poor with just 4.3% of the US GDP. Are the natural resources and the financial facts puzzling? The same UNEP report further informs that?Africa loses?an estimated?USD 195 billion annually?of its natural capital through illicit financial flows, illegal mining, illegal logging, the illegal trade in wildlife, unregulated fishing, and environmental degradation and loss.

As per?a report,?at least 15 African countries are facing civil wars, coups, extreme terrorism, and instability. In this background, it is seen that in these countries, peace is elusive and prosperity is missing leading to annual losses?amounting to $ 195 billion USD per year. It is also a classic case of a clash of agriculture, natural resources, and forest-based African civilization with the knowledge-based economy having self-interest at any cost as the supreme objective.?

This is a transition phase of the knowledge economy, which on one hand is trying to shed off its dark past of the atrocities caused during the industrial age, on the other hand, is refining invasion to become more subtle and lethal using the power of knowledge. It is for this reason, the tools for serving self-interest come in the guise of diplomatic strategies?creating channels for favorable trade. International organizations like the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) stress boosting growth and reducing poverty which seems like the exchange of gold in lieu of a piece of the loaf! The sustainable and equitable trade objective is missing and the sole objective?it seems is the plunder of natural resources and other raw materials.

The WTO Effect on National Economies

During the first half of the last decade of the twentieth century, the formation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) was the most exciting news. It was considered as if governments of the member states were going to grow prosperous overnight something akin to having the Philosopher’s stone! The picture below depicts the state of the world economy when the WTO came into existence on January 1st, 1995:

Three years short of reaching the age of 30 years, the following world map depicts the global economy in the year?2022:

The WTO was holding out hope for the less privileged for three major reasons that make WTO a special international organization. First, it was the first international organization that accepted the inequality among the member States and reaffirmed the classification as the developed, developing and least developed countries. Two, the WTO agreements were not toothless agreements signed at the international level; the agreements were multilateral in nature binding to all the members and non-compliance could inflict severe penalties. Three, all the Member States were having equal rights and obligations. Unfortunately, the 27 years journey of the WTO has benefited the developed countries the most. This widening inequality, rise in the sustenance cost, and the cost of trade proved dearer to the environment that became suffocating, and polluted. The main sources of life, air, and water were lost to pollution a by-product of development and industrialization.?

The rich become super rich and the poor continued to struggle to survive. International Labour Organization (ILO)?Reports?that fifty million people are in forced labor globally. Today world population officially completed eight billion. It means 0.6% population is into Slavery! More than 52% of all forced labor and a quarter of all forced marriages can be found in upper-middle-income or high-income countries. The following clip on the ILO web shows the real picture of the 21st?Century:

No wonder the struggle to survive is one of the main reasons for pushing people, especially, the girl children, into a ‘life sentence’ in the name of marriage, shelter, and employment. The renowned economist philosopher of ancient India, Chanakya, more than two thousand years ago said that for people financial well-being is supreme. For this supreme cause people legally and illegally migrate in the hope of a better future and get trapped in modern slavery. In order to survive one needs money to afford food, clothes, and shelter. Out of the 5298.5 million adults in the world, 2818 million (53.2%) adults earn less than $ 10,000 USD per year and form the?majority of the wealth pyramid; Opposite to this, the top of the pyramid is very sleek with just 62.5 million (1.2%) adults earning more than $ one million USD per year. The exploitation of humans by the human as modern slavery is a big blot on the progress made by human civilization.?

In the $100 trillion USD global economy in 2022, the global wealth pyramid depicts inequality in wealth distribution. There is no IQ test report that says that the bottom of the wealth pyramid is formed by the dumb people and the top, the smartest people. After considering the Global Wealth Pyramid, the Global Wealth Distribution should also be considered.

More than half of the world’s population (55%) has only $ 5.5 trillion i.e. 1.3% of the total wealth. The population and total wealth variables data are just reversed at the top of the wealth pyramid. Merely 1.3% of the world population has $ 191.6 trillion USD, which constitutes 45.8% of global wealth. The inequality in wealth distribution reveals that without unjust and unfair means of earning, such a wide gulf in wealth distribution is not possible. This wealth disparity causes those at the bottom of the wealth pyramid to adopt any means to earn money legal or illegal.

The incidence of killings in a school situated in a developed world becomes a global highlight in media but mass killings in Africa by terrorists do not get much attention in the media simply because the media industry is ruled by the developed world; no one promises for taking the revenge for killing the innocents. The income distribution at the country level also shows the unstable territories in the world the main reasons being civil war, terrorism, political instability, and a weak economy.?

The natural resources of Africa ought to have made it a rich continent. However, data points out to the contrary. The red color in more than half of Africa and Latin America silently tells the story of unabated plunder and exploitation. The plunder of the sovereign resources without resistance signifies the subtle arsenals that do not create a mass outrage and visible damage but work on a subtle level to impoverish the nation.

Today, our planet has officially become home to eight billion people. Before closing, it would be interesting to have a look at the population density in countries vis-à-vis prosperity from the perspective of economic disparity between the rich and the poor?together with the power of knowledge in shaping modern economies:

The inequality and exploitation of the poor are visible everywhere even in my country, India:

As stated earlier, there is a relationship between the financial disparity of people in the developing world and the insecurity in the developed world. The same relationship exists between the gap in financial wealth and injustice. This resultant insecurity has led to the development of the defense industry which ironically comes at the cost of public welfare. It is also seen that in the majority of cases, people from the lower half of the wealth pyramid become part of the defense forces. Once again, this highlights the dependency of the rich on the poor people who are blamed for the insecurity.

To be continued…