Some reformers would re-conceptualize IP by first identifying the minimum standards—for health, welfare, education—that government ought to meet for its citizens, and then adopting

(or modifying) IP law to help achieve those human rights outcomes. International lawyer Laurence Helfer cites as an example a 2001 report by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, analyzing the impact of TRIPS on the right to health:

[The right to health] includes an obligation for states to promote medical research and to provide access to affordable treatments, including essential drugs.

The High Commissioner’s report analyzes how intellectual property affects these two obligations. It acknowledges that patents help governments promote medical research by providing an incentive to invent new medical technologies, including new drugs. But the report also asserts that pharmaceutical companies’ “commercial motivation

… means that research is directed, first and foremost, towards ‘profitable’ disease.

Diseases that predominantly affect people in poorer countries … remain relatively under-researched.” One way to remedy this market imperfection is to create incentives for innovation outside of the patent system.16 How would you apply this human rights approach to the problem of supplying expensive but essential drugs—for malaria, tuberculosis, or HIV—to poor people in underdeveloped nations?