To judge from the informational shorts shown in theaters explaining how piracy of movies will lead to the collapse of production and loss of jobs, moviemakers understand the importance of intellectual property when it's a matter of their own corporate profits and jobs. As for le Carré, while he's not a corporation, he is essentially a sole proprietor who owns and exploits for profit the copyrighted material that he produces. Probably le Carré could not afford to go on writing books if he had forgone the handsome profits made by selling this copyrighted material. Of course, if he were independently wealthy or had married an heiress or something, then he might, if he chose, continue to write even though he made no profits from it. This is the difference between le Carré and a pharmaceutical corporation, which cannot be operated for love or charity. Pharmaceutical companies do not exist in nature; if they can't be run profitably they will cease to exist and we'll all be worse off. (Here's by how much: as Ronald Bailey reports, "Between 1960 and 1997, life expectancy at birth for Americans rose from 69.7 years to 76.5 years. 'Increased drug approvals and health expenditure per person jointly explain just about 100 percent of the observed long-run longevity increase,' writes [Frank] Lichtenberg.")

If drug companies are forcing "consent" among third-world clinical-trial subjects as is shown in The Constant Gardener that's deplorable and they should stop it. (Expropriation of their patents and profits, of course, is not a punishment fitted to this crime.) But as Meirelles says in this 1 September 2005 interview with FilmForce, "This plot is based on something that happened in Nigeria actually.... [T]hey were testing a drug for diabetes, and after four months, people who were taking the pills couldn't walk, so now there are a couple of lawyers suing this company." So, on the one hand, the drug companies are not getting away with it, not because of le Carré's raging potboiler but because of tort liability. On the other hand, we would need more information about what they are allegedly doing. To ensure the accuracy of trial results, some patients must be given placebo, and probably a certain amount of them would have been cured by the real drug. In addition, some trial patients may suffer from debilitating side effects. These aren't good things, but they have to be analyzed in context: Apart from the lack of consent, how is this situation different from clinical trials in America or Europe? What alternative is there for sick people in these impoverished countries? How many people do benefit from the trials? Why are trials outsourced to other countries in the first place?

Among the reasons for the latter, as Sonia Shah reports in the 30 August 2005 online version of The Nation, is the reluctance of first-world citizens to volunteer for drug trials. She writes, "On average, every American buys more than ten prescription drugs every year.... [Yet l]ess than one in twenty Americans take part in experimental trials, with half the American public maligning test subjects as 'guinea pigs,' according to a June 2004 Harris Poll. The logical outcome of this 'all gain, no pain' attitude toward modern drugs is for drug companies to shift the burden of experimentation away from Western consumers...." The fact that life is cheap, as it is put, in sub-Saharan Africa is the cause, not the result, of pharmaceutical companies bringing their clinical testing there. (By implication, the makers of The Constant Gardener, unlike the drug companies, do not see African lives as less valuable, but we'll have to take their word for it: there is only one African character who is as much as peripheral to the story and the English villains have more dimensions than he does.)