On one level it's greed--to be honest--and on another level it's a larger political agenda. And the larger political agenda, which I think has been on full display for decades now, has been that they want to impose on a global basis ever more stringent intellectual property rules, because that's in their interests as monopolists. I mean, that's in the nature of the scorpion that stings the frog carrying him across the river, right? Their interest is to protect a monopoly system as much as possible. And that's why they have first-world intellectual property standards globalized through the WTO.
The pharmaceutical industry and the entertainment industry were the major proponents of this agreement. That's very clear in the historical record. I'm not making that up. And they don't like the flexibilities that are in that regime, things like compulsory licensing, because if you're a patent holder, you're going to have a knee-jerk reaction against anything that allows your patent to be overridden, even if it's for a limited purpose. But WTO law is very clear that that is, in fact, part of striking the balance between protecting intellectual property and ensuring access.
That doesn't mean that they like it, so they will oppose--and they have opposed--every time developing countries either contemplate using compulsory licensing or issue compulsory licensing. And there is extraordinarily strong push-back: litigation, threats of trade sanctions, threats to withdraw the registration of new medicines—I'm talking about Thailand, South Africa, Brazil, and so on—over and over again, which is partly why, I think, countries have been reluctant to come forward, especially if what you're offering them is a flawed system that doesn't guarantee they're even going to get a medicine at the end of the day. Why would you stick your neck out and run the risk of this kind of retaliation when you're not expecting—