The protection of intellectual property (IP) is a question of life and death. COVID-19 vaccines, partially incentivized by IP, are estimated to have saved nearly 20 million lives worldwide during the first year of their availability in 2021. The vast majority of the benefit of this lifesaving technology, however, went to high- and upper-middle-income countries. Despite 10 billion vaccines having been produced by the end of 2021, only 4 percent of people in low-income countries were fully vaccinated. Paradoxically, IP may also be partly responsible for hundreds of thousands of lives lost in 2021, due to insufficient supply of vaccines and inequitable access during the critical first year of vaccine rollout, most notably in low-income countries that lacked the ability to buy or manufacture vaccines to save their populations. The contributors to this book diagnose a number of causes for the inequitable distribution of life-saving COVID-19 vaccines, from misguided reliance on intellectual property rights and voluntary mechanisms to share knowledge and vaccines, to the rise of vaccine nationalism and vaccine diplomacy, to unequal global intellectual property institutions that disenfranchise low-income countries and continue to reproduce colonial era dependency by poor countries on high income nations for life-saving technologies. Global experts herein suggest several reforms to prevent such inequity in the next pandemic, including delinking vaccine development from monopoly rights in technology, enhanced legal requirements to share publicly-funded technologies in pandemic times, and investment in technology transfer hubs and local vaccine manufacturing capacity in low and middle-income countries.

This chapter proposes the establishment of a Patent Philanthropy Initiative (PPI) as an alternative approach to equipping the global community with better preparedness for future public health crises. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) would be called upon to administer the PPI. Pharmaceutical companies owning USPTO-granted medical patents would be required to contribute 1 percent of their annual post-tax profits accrued from their patented medicines to the PPI. Such financial contributions would then be deployed by pharmaceutical companies to promote public health in the United States and abroad through transferring knowledge, donating medical products, constructing facilities, training professionals, and facilitating public health education.

The 2019 college admissions bribery scandal revealed uncomfortable truths about elite higher education and its conspicuous consumption. In this chapter, I explore the legal implications of treating higher education as a luxury good reflecting wealth and status. Like luxury goods companies, elite universities are regarded as owners of luxury brands. Just as companies such as Louis Vuitton, Ferrari, and Hermès own brands that enjoy a high level of exclusivity and serve conspicuous consumption, so too do elite universities. In the minds of many, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale are analogous to Louis Vuitton, Ferrari, and Hermès. This “luxurification” of higher education, however, perpetuates class division and violates the right to education.

In March 2020, even after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic, Labrador Diagnostics attempted through “the most tone-deaf IP suit in history”1 to block testing for coronavirus that used its patents. In June 2020, Gilead Sciences shocked the international community by pricing its patented medicine remdesivir at $3,120 per course of treatment for COVID-19 patients with private insurance in the United States. Thereafter, the company was vehemently accused of overcharging in “an offensive display of hubris and disregard for the public,”2 which also led to serious concerns that global efforts to contain the pandemic were effectively at the mercy of medical patent owners.3 Since December 2020 when the first COVID-19 vaccine was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, vaccine inequity has ravaged the globe. As of September 2021, a mere 3 percent of people in low-income countries had been vaccinated with at least one dose, in stark contrast to high-income countries’ 60 percent.

In July 2019, I presented a paper on the right to technology at an international conference that I hosted at the University of Hong Kong. The conference attracted an audience of around 120 attorneys and law students with an interest in technology law. Before I started, I asked the attendees whether they knew of the existence of a right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications, a human right that is protected by both the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Much to my surprise, none of them raised their hand in affirmation. Their universal silence means that this human right, which we can also call the right to technology, is unknown to those with a demonstrable interest in the subject area. This example is by no means an isolated case.

Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite and other explosives, suffered from severe depression following a French newspaper’s erroneous publication of his obituary in 1888. The obituary condemned him as a “merchant of death” who had become wealthy by inventing new technologies designed to “kill more people faster than ever before.”1 Many other newspapers worldwide followed the obituary’s lead in celebrating Nobel’s supposed demise, which later proved to be what we would today call “fake news.” Devastated by the international media’s accusations, Nobel began to reevaluate his fame and fortune, both of which derived from his invention and patenting of deadly technologies, although those technologies had also facilitated construction work ranging from rock blasting to the building of canals. This reevaluation led him to denounce the widespread use of weapons in wars as “the horror of all horrors and the greatest of all crimes”2 and to dedicate most of his wealth to funding the establishment of Nobel prizes in a variety of fields, earning him a posthumous reputation for promoting peace and knowledge growth.

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal discussed in Chapter 4, Facebook and other major technology companies were accused of being even more irresponsible than the financial institutions that caused the 2008 financial crisis.1 The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) responded to the scandal by imposing a fine of roughly $5 billion on Facebook in July 2019 for mishandling private data, the largest fine ever issued by the FTC.2 However, the FTC’s response triggered heated debate over whether a fine was an effective deterrent. Facebook’s stock price actually surged following the FTC’s decision, which led to claims that the decision had served to increase Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth.3 Legislators proclaimed that the FTC had “failed miserably” with this “inadequate” and “historically hollow” decision.