TR: What about Jamaica?

LEHMAN: Jamaican music accounts for about three percent of the global music business. It's more than $1.2 billion of revenue, but none of that business activity takes place in Jamaica. The music emanates from there, but they do not have the institutions there on the island to get the business done. We made a lot of recommendations to the Ministry of Industry on how to change that.

LEHMAN: Island Records [the late Bob Marley's record label] is actually all Jamaicans, but the business is all done in London and the United States. This gets really to the whole point of what we do. The WIPO seminars are all a bunch of the same old people who know one another getting on a plane and going to a seminar. It's all lawyers, and they all just talk about what a patent law looks and what a trademark law looks like and so on. What these countries really need is to understand is how you use intellectual property rights in a practical business sense to make money and to generate economic activity and economic growth. The publishing revenue alone from Jamaican music is about $300 million a year, and yet not a single penny of that is run through a music publisher on the island. The Jamaican Performing Rights society last year had revenues of about $300,000, all of which came from licensing radio and television stations in Jamaica. They have no reciprocal agreements with ASCAP and BMI (in the U.S.), or with SACEM in France, so they get not a penny from overseas.

TR: So there is this disconnect between these global treaties and what really happens in developing countries.

LEHMAN: You go to the WTO (the World Trade Organization) in Geneva, and you're trying to negotiate a trade treaty and you say, "You guys should respect intellectual property rights!" But these guys are getting completely ripped off, and they're getting none of the rights that really should be flowing through their economy.

TR: What about patents? How can you make invention more indigenous to some of these countries?

LEHMAN: Another project we're setting up is a Bayh-Dole type of system for South Africa.

TR: That's the 1980 law that enables universities to collect licensing revenue from patents resulting from government-funded research.

LEHMAN: Yes. South Africa is typical of a lot of developing countries. It has a highly developed society within a very poor society. Now, in that case, that was more of a racial thing. But it had a very sophisticated R&D operation in the public sector and the academic sector that in the apartheid regime was largely driven by the military industrial complex, which was cut off from the rest of the world. Now, they have to integrate their economy into the world, and they have to try to raise their GDP growth to bring that vast impoverished black population somewhere closer to that of the white population so you don't see the kind of thing that we've seen happen in next door in Zimbabwe. And so we went down there, and we had set up an organization with US AID money for every single university laboratory and government laboratory. Some of them already had activity in this area, but we're ramping that up greatly. The University of Stellenbosch, for example, is working on an AIDS vaccine. We are building high technology transfer offices at all of these institutions in South Africa, and we're also trying to hook them up with their peers in the United States so now they'll be able to get grants from the U.S. National Institutes for Health. All this helps stem the brain drain, which is a big problem in some of these countries.