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Abstract

In this book, I explore why multinational corporations have not been able to accumulate highly profitable patent rights in a multitude of countries earlier. This question is currently a topic of interest among political economists and legal scholars, who have discovered that massive corporate profits and inequality between firms cannot be explained solely by financialization in the narrow sense. My argument is that the establishment of highly profitable patent positions was difficult for multinational corporations for a long time because governments trusted only self-granted legal positions, not patent positions granted by other governments. Due to this mistrust among governments, multinational corporations had to have the same patent claims examined anew in each country, which entailed significant costs, delays, and thus uncertainty for both corporations and governments. What I show in this dissertation is that this uncertainty was ultimately overcome not through political-legal initiatives of individual governments, but through cooperation among multinational corporations, which jointly built up increasing expertise in linking national patent positions and shared it with governments.

By focusing on the cooperative projects of multinational corporations, this book goes beyond existing political-economic explanations of the establishment of patent positions. While political-economic explanations correctly emphasize that political-legal initiatives were more important for the development of modern patent systems than general technical innovations, they underestimate the importance of legal-technical expertise for the implementation of political-legal initiatives. Without legal-technical expertise, not only would the costs of acquiring intellectual property rights have remained prohibitively high for multinational corporations and governments, but they also would not have been able to use uniform patent and R&D information to more accurately assess the profitability of their own and others' R&D projects. In fact, new legal-technical evaluation platforms have become central to the coordination of knowledge in global product markets and today form the basis for the financialization of knowledge.