Across an amazing sweep of the critical areas of business regulation - from contract, intellectual property and corporations law, to trade, telecommunications, labour standards, drugs, food, transport and environment - this book confronts the question of how the regulation of business has shifted from national to global institutions. Based on interviews with 500 international leaders in business and government, this book examines the role played by global institutions such as the WTO, the ...

Are intellectual property rights like other property rights? More and more of the world’s knowledge and information is under the control of intellectual property owners. What are the justifications for this? What are the implications for power and for justice of allowing this property form to range across social life? Can we look to traditional property theory to supply the answers or do we need a new approach? Intellectual property rights relate to abstract objects - objects like algorith...

To deal with the climate crisis we need a new paradigm of technological and social development aimed at the restoration of ecological systems--the bio-digital energy paradigm--and China is the world power best positioned to lead this change. The climate and energy crisis requires a strong state to change the direction, speed, and scale of innovation in world capitalism. There are only a few possible contenders for catalyzing this governance of survival: China, the European...

New intellectual property regimes are entrenching new inequalities. Access to information is fundamental to the exercise of human rights and marketplace competition, but patents are being used to lock up vital educational, software, genetic and other information, creating a global property order dominated by a multinational elite. How did intellectual property rules become part of the World Trade Organization's free trade agreements? How have these rules changed the knowledge game for inte...

After colonization, indigenous people faced an extractive property rights regime for both their land and knowledge. This book outlines that regime, and how the symbolic function of international intellectual property continues today to assist states to enclose indigenous peoples' knowledge. Drawing on more than 200 interviews, Peter Drahos examines the response of indigenous people to the colonizer's non-developmental property rights. The case studies reveal how they have adapted to the st...

Patent offices around the world have granted millions of patents to multinational companies. Patent offices are rarely studied and yet they are crucial agents in the global knowledge economy. Based on a study of forty-five rich and poor countries that takes in the world's largest and smallest offices, Peter Drahos argues that patent offices have become part of a globally integrated private governance network, which serves the interests of multinational companies, and that the Trilateral Of...

A New York Times–bestselling account of the next great economic era, with a look into the individuals pioneering its implementation around the world.One of the most influential social thinkers of our time reveals how Internet technology and renewable energy are merging to create the new jobs of the twenty-first century and change the world.In The Third Industrial Revolution, Jeremy Rifkin takes us on a journey into a new economic era where h...

Why has the world been unable to address global warming? Science policy expert Roger Pielke, Jr., says it's not the fault of those who reject the Kyoto Protocol, but those who support it, and the magical thinking that the agreement represents. In The Climate Fix, Pielke offers a way to repair climate policy, shifting the debate away from meaningless targets and toward a revolution in how the world's economy is powered, while de-fanging the venomous politics surrounding the crisis....

This is a fully revised and updated new edition of the classic work first published in 1985. There have been many important developments since the first edition, including enactment of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in Canada in 1982, the impact of the European Human Rights Convention, and the consideration by English courts of Judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. Social and cultural changes mean that free speech claims are being made in novel contexts: to challenge the val...

Essential, visionary essays about our post-carbon futureClimate change, along with the depletion of oil, coal, and gas dictate that we will inevitably move away from our profound societal reliance on fossil fuels; but just how big a transformation will this be? While many policy-makers assume that renewable energy sources will provide an easy "plug-and-play" solution, author Richard Heinberg suggests instead that we are in for a wild ride; a "civilization reboot" o...

Countries worldwide are struggling to imitate the industrial prowess of the East Asian pacesetters, but growth accelerations have proven remarkably transient. Building a portfolio of tradable goods and services and steadily raising the level of investment in these activities, has generally defied the best policy efforts - in particular, bringing investment ratios on par with East Asian averages has presented the greatest challenge. Hence the search is on for growth recipes not so tightly boun...

We need to act five times faster to avoid dangerous climate change. As Greenland melts, Australia burns, and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, we think we know who the villains are: oil companies, consumerism, weak political leaders. But what if the real blocks to progress are the ideas and institutions that are supposed to be helping us? Five Times Faster is an inside story from Simon Sharpe, who has spent ten years at the forefront of climate change policy and diplomacy. In our ...