However, research on the experience of South Korea by the late Linsu Kim, Professor of Management at Korea University, led him to find that “strong IP rights protection will hinder rather than facilitate technology transfer and indigenous learning activities in the early stage of industrialization when learning takes place through reverse engineering and duplicative imitation of mature foreign products.” He also concluded that “only after countries have accumulated sufficient indigenous capabilities with extensive science and technology infrastructure to undertake creative imitation in the later stage does IP rights protection become an important element in technology transfer and industrial activities.” Similarly, Nagesh Kumar, a researcher at the Research and Information System for the Non-Aligned and other Developing Countries, a Delhi-based think tank, found that in East Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, a combination of relatively weak patent protection and the availability of other IP rights such as industrial designs and utility models encouraged technological learning. The weak patent regimes helped by allowing for local absorption of foreign innovations. Industrial designs and utility models encouraged minor adaptations and inventions by local firms. Later on, the patent systems became stronger partly because local technological capacity was sufficiently advanced to generate a significant amount of domestic innovation, and also as a result of international pressure.

The historical evidence therefore seems convincing in making the moral and economic case that developing countries should be allowed to adopt their own patent standards—however divergent these may be from those of the rich countries. One could plausibly counter that the world of commerce has changed so much, including the way companies do their business across national boundaries, that making patent policy on the basis of history is misguided. But how much has the world really changed since the 19th century? Globalization, trade liberalization, and the knowledge-based economy (whatever these terms really mean) are hardly new phenomena. As early as 1852, the Victorian scientist and politician Lord Lyon Playfair observed that “the competition of industry has become a competition of intellect” and also in 1888 that “to a great extent national markets have been destroyed, because the world has become the one market for all nations.” More recently, Peter Howitt of Brown University observed that, “the information revolution we are now living through is dramatically raising the premium on particular kinds of knowledge and skills, while rendering others obsolete. But the same was true of the explosion in technological knowledge in textiles in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and of technological progress in agriculture in the first half of the 20th century.”

Despite the undeniable uncertainties, history would appear to indicate two things. First, the developed countries are being hypocritical in demanding that the rest of the world adopt their own patent and other IP standards before many of them feel they are ready. Second, and much more important, in doing so they are preventing the developing countries from adopting appropriate patent standards for their levels of development, a freedom today’s rich countries made sure not to deny themselves when they were developing economies.