As usual, this week brought a variety of points of view and types of news in the world of intellectual property. Two publications show this contrast vividly.

One was the 2010 U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC) Annual Report on Intellectual Property Enforcement (a bit of a redundant name).   This Report chronicles the Department’s efforts in the past year to strengthen intellectual property enforcement in order to create jobs, protect American business domestically and internationally, and protect consumers.  One of the ways IPEC is doing this is through various actions to combat the sale of counterfeit drugs, including drugs that either are ineffective or are actually harmful to patients.

The other was a new book from MIT Press, Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property, edited by Gaëlle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski.  Krikorian and Kapczynski provide a collection of essays that chronicles the history of thinking of the Access to Knowledge social movement, which includes activists working to open up intellectual property with regard to drug patents in the developing world, indigenous farmers anxious to preserve access to traditional seeds and plants, students involved with the free culture and open access movements, and many others .

Two essays on drug patents and the developing world caught my attention.  The first, “The Revised Drug Strategy: Access to Essential Medicines, Intellectual Property, and the World Health Organization,” chronicles the process and struggle of developing the Model Lists of Essential Medicines through the World Health Organization.  A place on the list allows a developing country to issue a compulsory license for that drug.    The second, Sangeeta Shashikant’s essay on “The Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health,” points out the problems of “evergreening” to extend the life of patents and concerns about supplies of generic medicine in developing countries since treaty obligations required India to start issuing pharmaceutical patents in 2005.

Although no one wants the sale of medicines that are ineffective and harmful—the IPEC report mentions the sale of a counterfeit medicine that contained an ingredient used to make sheetrock—here are two very different ways of describing the problem and its solution.