Our advocacy has not been on just a modernized TRIPS waiver. What we've said is that the way we create intellectual property and the way we protect it has to be modernized. At the time that TRIPS came into being, this kind of activity was centred in a very few countries, as you've heard from others. Now you find that many more countries—in fact, I find it interesting that we keep coming back to India, South Africa and indeed China—are actually net creators of IP and net exporters of IP.
We have to understand that what TRIPS does is it provides a monopoly rent to holders of IP. The reason we provide that monopoly rent is so that, as we hear so often from the industry and from other experts, they can then reinvest in really risky activities like big pharma. Here's the reality in pharma, which Jesse, of course, would know: Pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing and government relations and lobbying than they do on R and D. That is not what the monopoly rent that comes from IP is supposed to be doing. Now that we've had a couple of decades of experience with how we create monopoly rents and what they're used for, I think it's incumbent on us to think about how we regulate IP and how we create its dissemination.
I would also say something about the presence of technologies that have spillover effects, and I'll stop on this point. Think of a groundbreaking technology that might address, say, solar cell storage issues in climate change, or inoculations. If I do it, other people around me benefit. Having a market price, which is effectively what TRIPS advocates, is overpricing something. We have to understand that in the presence of externalities, in the presence of the way monopoly rents are being used, we have to revisit the fact that technologies are created for a purpose: They're created to increase global welfare. I'm all for incentive structures, but the incentive structures that we currently have are actually skewed.