This one's for you, Matt: Wired reports on Brazil's radical rejection of the intellectual property dogma which has kept scores in the third world from accessing life-saving drugs:

In 1996, in response to Brazil's alarming rate of AIDS infection, the government of then-president Fernando Henrique Cardoso guaranteed distribution of the new retroviral drug cocktails to all HIV carriers in the country. Five years later, with the AIDS rate dropping, it was clear that the plan was wise but - at the prices being charged for the patented drugs in the cocktail, utterly unsustainable. Brazil's economy is the world's 10th largest, but it is also the world's most unequal, with 10 percent of the populationin control of almost half the wealth and more than 20 percent living in desperate poverty. Those are the sorts of figures that strain a government's budget even when it's not trying to stop the spread of AIDS. Such was the arithmetic that led José Serra - economist, politician, and the man who set Brazil on its path toward IP independence - to take an interest in the topic. "I always found intellectual property boring," says Serra, appointed health minister under Cardoso in 1998. "Among economists, intellectual property isn't considered one of the noble questions." But with the drug patents standing between Serra and a functioning AIDS program, the problem took on a particular urgency. His first approach was to go to the key patent holders, the US pharmaceutical giant Merck and the Swiss firm Roche, and ask for a volume discount. When the companies said no, Serra raised the stakes. Under Brazilian law, he informed them, he had the power in cases of national emergency to license local labs to produce patented drugs, royalty free, and he would use it if necessary. Merck immediately caved, but Roche stood its ground until August 2001, when Serra prepared to make good on his threat by drawing up the required paperwork. It was the first time a poor country had even come close to breaking a drug patent - and Roche, stunned, returned to the bargaining table with a newly cooperative attitude. In return for Serra's agreement to play nice, the drugmaker would reduce the price of its drug in Brazil to less than half what it was (and less than Brazil's cost to go it alone)...Already the outlines of an international open source alliance - a coalition of the penguin, if you will - have begun to emerge. India, for instance, is mustering a political commitment to free software that Stallman himself has declared second only to Brazil's. And at the last UN World Summit on the Information Society, Brazil led a bloc including India, South Africa, and China that thwarted an attempt by the US and its allies to harden the UN's line on intellectual property rights, insisting that the final conference document recognize just as strongly the cultural and economic importance of shared knowledge.