Stephen Pollard: Stealing other people's ideas is not a joke

The hoax Jamie Oliver book may seem like a wheeze, but taken any further it will kill millions

Have you had your copy of the now infamous pirated Jamie Oliver cookbook, The Naked Chef 2? Recipes from "monkfish wrapped in banana leaves with ginger, cilantro, chilli and coconut milk" to "roasted sweet garlic and thyme risotto with toasted almonds and breadcrumbs", all with a fetching picture of Jamie on the front.

It turns out that the whole thing is a hoax. There's no new book on its way, and it's merely a compilation of his already published recipes. But fun as it might seem - and who wouldn't want a free recipe for "summer fruit and prosecco jelly"? - the circulation of this prank is based on an idea that threatens to condemn millions more Aids sufferers to death, and undermines efforts to cure cancer.

The idea is that intellectual property doesn't matter. The spoof book is, after all, theft - of Jamie Oliver's ideas. Those ideas have made him a very rich man for one simple reason: they are popular. When he publishes a book, its success stands or falls on whether people like what he has to offer.

Clearly, they do. And that's why he comes up with new recipes: to make more money. If, on the other hand, everything he wrote was handed over for free - either stolen from him, like the current hoax book, or because intellectual property was no longer be protected by law - we would almost certainly have seen the last of Jamie Oliver. There'd be no incentive for him to keep inventing new recipes.

If you don't like The Naked Chef, that may be no big loss. But what if that logic was applied to something where the choice is less frivolous - Aids cures, or other medicines?

Next month in Cancun, Mexico, the World Trade Organisation is meeting to discuss precisely that proposal. At the last such meeting, in Doha, two years ago, there was a declaration that the world's poorest countries should be allowed to ignore patents when they were faced with epidemics such as HIV, malaria and TB. Who, after all, could stand by and watch in such emergencies? Certainly not the drugs companies, who backed the proposal - hardly surprising, since they already gave away many such drugs when the need arose.

It's not. however, that straightforward. The anti-globalisation movement has long targeted intellectual property as representing all that they wish to destroy. On their own, the arguments they advance are easily refuted. They say, for instance, that the real problem in the developing world is that essential medicines are patented, the costs of which deny the poor access.

Yet almost none of the relevant medicines are patented. At last month's global Aids conference in Paris, Amir Attaran of Harvard published a report which found that "essential medicines are rarely patented in developing countries." His paper shows that. 98.7 per cent of the time, there were no patents on any of the World Health Organisation's list of 325 essential drugs. In other words, the fulminating over patents concerns 1.3 per cent of the real issue.

The Director-General of the WHO, Dr Jong-Wook Lee, has pointed to the real problem when discussing the WHO's goal of providing antiretroviral drugs to three million HIV-positive people in developing countries by 2005: "It is not just the issue of money, because clearly if all the money and all the drugs were available today, I doubt whether we could implement it right now because of the weak infrastructures, such as the shortage of nurses and doctors." Many poor countries lack the health infrastructure to distribute medicines or even diagnose disease. The anti-patent lobby has nothing to say about the real problem.

But those arguments are not the only game in town. Since the Doha declaration two years ago, the negotiations have seen the list of supposed justifications for ignoring patents growing longer almost by the day. The reason: countries like Brazil, India and Argentina do not respect patents and have large pirate pharmaceutical industries looking for new markets. They have been pushing for countries to be able to declare self-determined epidemics, however ridiculous - erectile dysfunction, for instance - and then to be able to import generic (copycat) drugs.

These are not arcane, technical issues, but arguments which will have a direct bearing on our ability to conquer illness. It's already possible to see what will happen if intellectual property protection is destroyed. India's 20,000-plus drug makers churn out cheap copies of Viagra and Rogaine for rich city dwellers while treating less than 1 per cent of the country's 4 million HIV cases.

The pharmaceutical industry spends vast sums on research and development - $30.5bn in 2001. Without the protection of patents, which make possible a return on such investments, that research simply would not happen. The losers would be the millions of Aids and cancer sufferers who would no longer have the hope of a cure. Poorer countries would also lose any incentive to develop research-based drug industries of their own, and the Indian model would prevail.

Today's crusade against drug patents is just the sharp end of a broader assault on intellectual property and global capitalism in general. The hoax Jamie Oliver book may seem like a wheeze, but taken any further it will kill millions.

The author is a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe, a Brussels-based think-tank