This powerful book is the definitive history of how the new global intellectual property regime—the rulebook for the knowledge economy—came to be. Drawing on more than five years of research and more than five hundred interviews with key figures—including negotiators for First and Third World countries, leaders of multinational corporations, and public-interest experts, uncovers the story of how a small coterie of multinational corporations wrote the charter for the global information order. is an authoritative history of the demise of the world's intellectual commons, and a potent call for democratic property rights.