Corporatocracy
Should corporations be allowed to patent living organisms, and what are the implications for society and ethics?
Corporatocracy: How Corporations Learned to Govern Democracies continues the investigation launched in The Corporation – Part 2, turning to biotechnology and the unsettling question of who gets to own life. Through an urgent, investigative lens, the film follows journalists and activists as they challenge a growing corporatocracy in which legal systems and market logic collide with basic ethical boundaries. At the center is the Jacquarbetti case and its aftermath, a chain of events that forces viewers to confront what it means when living organisms become commodities.
The documentary traces a chronological path through pivotal moments: an initial rejection at the patent office, the escalating legal fight, and a Supreme Court ruling that ultimately opens the door to patenting living organisms. General Electric, Professor Jacquarbetti, and a chorus of reporters and campaigners appear as key figures in a larger struggle between corporate interests seeking control over biotechnological innovation and members of the public who fear the moral and social costs of treating life as intellectual property. Interviews, archival materials, and investigative reporting build a case that this is not simply a technical debate about patents, but a defining conflict over accountability, transparency, and the value of life versus profit.
As the film widens its view, it also highlights the risks faced by those who speak out, including a whistleblower lawsuit against Fox News that ends with a jury verdict against the network. Taken together, these battles suggest that the fight over biotechnological patents is ongoing, and that the consequences of corporatocracy extend far beyond the courtroom into everyday choices about science, regulation, and democratic oversight. Watch to see how this story challenges assumptions about innovation, ethics, and who gets to decide what life is worth.
In the late 1970s through the 1990s, deregulation and pro-business court rulings expanded intellectual property rights as biotechnology boomed. Public anxiety grew over genetically modified organisms, agribusiness power, and media consolidation, while whistleblowers tested new corporate and legal limits on accountability.
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This film’s dominant mode is expository. It builds a case through interviews, archival material, and investigative reporting that guide viewers toward a clear ethical judgment. This approach delivers its point of view by framing patent law as a public-interest issue, pressing accountability and warning against turning life into property.
Director & Year: Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, 2003.
Biotech Patent Case: Diamond v. Chakrabarty (U.S. Supreme Court, decided June 16, 1980) held that a live, human-made microorganism is patentable subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101. Justia (U.S. Supreme Court case)
Corporate Protagonist: General Electric employed scientist Ananda M. Chakrabarty, whose oil-eating bacterium patent application became the basis of Diamond v. Chakrabarty. Wikipedia (case overview)
Patent Office Backstory: The U.S. patent examiner initially rejected Chakrabarty’s claims on the ground that living organisms were not patentable, before appellate rulings led to Supreme Court review. Justia (U.S. Supreme Court case)
Patent Law Context: The USPTO’s Manual of Patent Examining Procedure cites Diamond v. Chakrabarty as establishing that “living matter” is not, by itself, a bar to patent eligibility (with separate statutory exclusion for human organisms). USPTO (MPEP 2105)
Whistleblower Protagonist: Reporter Jane Akre won a Florida whistleblower jury verdict in Tampa in 2000 after a dispute tied to a story about genetically engineered bovine growth hormone at Fox’s WTVT station. WIRED (Aug. 2000)
Journalism Partner: Investigative reporter Steve Wilson worked with Jane Akre at WTVT as a husband-and-wife reporting team hired in December 1996, according to later appellate case summaries. MoreLaw (case summary)
Geopolitical Context: The patentability dispute unfolded within U.S. federal law and institutions—Congress’s Patent Act framework, the USPTO examination process, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s authority to interpret patent-eligible subject matter. Justia (U.S. Supreme Court case)
Topical context
This film is part of the World Map of Conflict dataset—an interactive documentary collection that combines curated films with conflict data and country context to explain geopolitical developments since 1945.
Within the collection, the film sits in the Pax Americana educational pathway, which explores the U.S.-led effort to prevent another global war by promoting, and at times enforcing, liberal democracy and capitalism.
The economic contradictions of pax americana, which is the film’s overarching topic, links market-led peace to corporate externalities and inequality that destabilize democratic legitimacy and provoke backlash.
The film highlights how Pax Americana’s market order enables patenting life, shifting public goods into private rents and sharpening the economic contradictions of pax americana.
Learning Throughlines
Incentives and externalities.
The film keeps returning to the gap between what a corporation is rewarded for and what it costs everyone else. A business lobbyist insists that accountability belongs in the marketplace, with shareholders and public image, while a critic replies that social responsibility is only a voluntary tactic: one day you see Bambi, the next day you see Godzilla. Even a carpet-industry chief executive concedes that not a single industrial company on Earth is sustainable, and that by his own judgment he stands convicted as a plunderer of the Earth. Accountability is in the marketplace, says the lobbyist
Regulatory politics and soft capture.
Two reporters describe how a chemical company got its engineered growth hormone to market by bringing university professors, experts, reporters and finally the federal regulators into the fold, and how their own station then demanded 83 rewrites of the story before firing them. Their manager put it bluntly: we just paid three billion dollars for these television stations, the news is what we say it is. This is the pattern critics call corporatocracy, a system in which corporations, rather than elected government, effectively set the rules they are supposed to answer to. The news is what we say it is
Global supply chains and hidden accountability.
A retailer and a celebrity label first ask why anyone should believe that children work in their overseas factory, until a teenage worker from that factory arrives in the United States and testifies before Congress. The apology is public and an agreement is signed, yet the film notes that conditions soon returned to what they had been. The lasting effect, the activist argues, was that a fight played out on television for weeks made sweatshops and starvation wages known to almost everyone in the country, and that wherever capital puts its foot down it can be held accountable. A child worker flies in to confront the brand
Commons and privatization.
The film opens with a court case in which a laboratory-modified microbe becomes a patentable invention and a later one-sentence decree that anything alive except a full-birth human being may be patented, so that genes and seeds become intellectual property. It then moves to Bolivia, where a loan condition handed a foreign corporation control over all of a city’s water, even that which fell from the sky, with families living on two dollars a day charged up to a quarter of their income. Against this, an Indian activist describes coalitions that revoked a patent on neem and most of a patent on basmati rice, and farmers who treat saving seed as a duty to the Earth. A city's water sold off as a loan condition
Related topics
Documentary Mode
This film’s dominant mode is expository. It builds a case through interviews, archival material, and investigative reporting that guide viewers toward a clear ethical judgment. This approach delivers its point of view by framing patent law as a public-interest issue, pressing accountability and warning against turning life into property.
Key Facts
Director & Year: Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, 2003.
Biotech Patent Case: Diamond v. Chakrabarty (U.S. Supreme Court, decided June 16, 1980) held that a live, human-made microorganism is patentable subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101. Justia (U.S. Supreme Court case)
Corporate Protagonist: General Electric employed scientist Ananda M. Chakrabarty, whose oil-eating bacterium patent application became the basis of Diamond v. Chakrabarty. Wikipedia (case overview)
Patent Office Backstory: The U.S. patent examiner initially rejected Chakrabarty’s claims on the ground that living organisms were not patentable, before appellate rulings led to Supreme Court review. Justia (U.S. Supreme Court case)
Patent Law Context: The USPTO’s Manual of Patent Examining Procedure cites Diamond v. Chakrabarty as establishing that “living matter” is not, by itself, a bar to patent eligibility (with separate statutory exclusion for human organisms). USPTO (MPEP 2105)
Whistleblower Protagonist: Reporter Jane Akre won a Florida whistleblower jury verdict in Tampa in 2000 after a dispute tied to a story about genetically engineered bovine growth hormone at Fox’s WTVT station. WIRED (Aug. 2000)
Journalism Partner: Investigative reporter Steve Wilson worked with Jane Akre at WTVT as a husband-and-wife reporting team hired in December 1996, according to later appellate case summaries. MoreLaw (case summary)
Geopolitical Context: The patentability dispute unfolded within U.S. federal law and institutions—Congress’s Patent Act framework, the USPTO examination process, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s authority to interpret patent-eligible subject matter. Justia (U.S. Supreme Court case)