The drug industry is fiercely resisting Biden’s proposed waiver of intellectual-property protections, not just because of lost exorbitant profits this year and next, but because the waiver is the proverbial camel’s nose under the tent.

And the industry is right. The entire intellectual-property regime of patents, trademarks, and copyrights has become a protectionist racket to favor incumbents, block innovators, promote monopoly prices, and harm consumers.

The original idea of patents was to promote and reward invention. The system has been turned into its opposite.

Over the past several decades, intellectual-property protection has been a one-way ratchet—longer terms of patent protection for lifesaving drugs; longer copyright protection for everything from music to digital techniques; more subtle and insidious blocking techniques to resist potential innovators who might provide competition.

The vaccine waiver falls under the jurisdiction of trade policy because powerful industries managed to get the U.S. and other large countries to lock in excessive patent protection via the WTO, under a 1994 agreement known as TRIPS, which stands for Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights.

TRIPS locks in pro-industry protections globally, and has been used over the years to make it impossible for member nations to broaden what should be in the public domain. It’s an epic case of the use of obscure trade rules to make it harder to regulate capitalism.

Domestically, jurisdiction over intellectual-property policy is split. USTR handles trade. The FCC deals with what should be open and what should be proprietary when it comes to the internet. The FDA deals with abuses involving generic versus patent-protected drugs. From time to time, the Federal Trade Commission has launched inquiries on general questions of patent, trademark, and copyright policy.

While there are some admirable groups defending openness in particular sectors, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, there is no single public-interest group advocating the broadest possible public domain against serial and cumulative abuses of patents, trademarks, and copyrights.

Congressional jurisdiction is also split among several committees, though Sen. Pat Leahy (D-VT), who chairs the subcommittee on intellectual property, is a great progressive and a natural candidate to lead a broader inquiry. He is a longtime champion of global diffusion of lifesaving drugs via the licensing provision allowed in TRIPS, and was the lead Democratic sponsor of one of the few bipartisan consumer protection bills signed into law by President Trump. Leahy’s CREATES Act deters drug companies from using a variety of deceptive techniques to block generic producers from producing drugs once they are off-patent.

Leahy has also been a foe of misuse of overly broad patents to intimidate and demand license fees from independent companies using well-established techniques in the public domain. One Vermont company, successfully thwarted by Leahy and Vermont state officials, used an overly broad patent to try to collect license fees from companies that were converting scans to emails.

Excess intellectual-property protection, at the expense of the public interest, is another of those creeping abuses of capitalism that have just gotten away from us. Now the vaccine issue shines a useful light on a broader imperative. Bring on that camel!