The latter countries are now paying considerable rent for the intellectual property transferred from the Global North and are much more inclined to emphasize responsibility to the public than the rights of creators. Basic Questions Revisited These and related fundamental changes suggest the need to revisit traditional intellectual property questions. One of the most obvious of these is the question of who makes the rules, both domestically and internationally. Intellectual property policies in a technological society have a much greater social impact than in the slowly industrializing societies in which precedents were set. It is now the creators of intellectual property, or their lawyers, that dominate Congress and the court system.
Consumers receive relatively less consideration.
In international forums economic interests dominate negotiations. Understandably, given the nature of the organization, the economic rights of intellectual property owners were stressed and deeper moral and philosophical issues were ignored. As the focus of economic activity changes, it is also useful to revisit the related question of the proper mix between the rights of creators of intellectual property to profit from their products and the needs of society to have widespread access to them. Over time, government has assumed a greater role in nurturing and educating children, as well as financing research and development, and a strong argument can be made for a greater consumer access to resulting products. But since the collapse of socialism, such arguments find less resonance, and the rights of creators to profit are stressed at the expense of their responsibilities to make intellectual property fairly available.