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Essay Subject: Examines the WTO agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS).... More...

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Paper Abstract: Examines the WTO agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS). History of agreement. Issues involved: royalties, patents, trademarks, inventions. International agreements. Tie-in to GATT. Foreign trade. Quotas & protective tariffs. Controversy over WTO & TRIPS. Access to patented pharmaceuticals. Public imae of WTO. Gap between poor & rich countries. Paper Introduction: This research examines the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS). The research will set forth a brief history of how the agreement came into being and then discuss the major sections of the accord, as well as issue fronts that public scrutiny of it has produced, with a view toward forecasting possible lines of development. The origin of the World Trade Organization can be traced to two treaties negotiated in Paris, one in 1833 and another 50 years later. In 1833 the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property became the first treaty in history aimed at assisting creators of patentable industrial products of one signatory country in obtaining protection "for their intellectual creations" (WIPO, 2001) in the other signatory count Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. TRIPS relies on WIPO to fosterharmonization of member-state IP laws, standards, and practices, but ittends to articulate higher and more up-to-date standards that reflect theverities of high-technology, information-based foreign trade. Thisemerged first at the Seattle Round of 1999, which was informally billed asWTO's "development round" and which was intended to "close the gap betweenpoor countries and the rich" (Flanigan, 1999, p. GATT included a long schedule of specific tariff concessions for each contracting nation, representing tariff rates that each country had agreed to extend to others. Willson Whitman (Ed.) Eau Claire, Wisconsin: E.M. The Paris and Berne Unions were by no means the onlyintellectual-property treaties concluded between and among nation-statesover the course of the next 12 years, a point to which this research willreturn. La Jolla, Calif.: Britannica.com. The government does compensate the patent holder, but thepatent is breached all the same. 29 ).Jefferson's oft-quoted statement has been used to prove both that he wasthe father of American patents and an opponent of granting them for profit.Each idea can be supported in part, though Jefferson's last remark aboutthe equivalence of innovation in all countries has been overtaken in themodern period by dramatic differences between industrialized countries ofthe world, particularly the industrial democracies, and so-calleddeveloping and least-developed countries. so-called technical barriers to trade, which include consumer,environmental and workplace safety regulations" (Weissman, 1995, p. The more complex the innovation, the more complex IPdiscourse and issue fronts became, given the persistence of differentmodalities of nation-state response to IP issues. Chicago: EncyclopædiaBritannica, Inc. Retrieved from the World Wide Web 4 August 2 1 athttp://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/. WIPO Database of Intellectual Property Legislative Texts.Paris: World Intellectual Property Organization. . To one degree or another, these shortcomings reflected an unwillingness by the GATT's Contracting Parties more fully to empower the GATT as an international organization (Beckington, 2 1, p. First, as the increasing length of rounds and the increasingperiods of time between rounds show, negotiations became increasinglyprotracted. IP entitlements and rights within the meaning of internationalagreements refer to compensation meant to be paid for the use of industrialand intellectual uniqueness, novelty, and innovation. 2 ). United Nations General Assembly. Overall, the effect of GATT rounds was to dramatically reducethe scale of tit-for-tat trade-by-tariff and international protectionism.However, over the course of the life of GATT, three general trends could bediscerned. UN Department of Public Information. Global financial architecture? Britannica 2 1Deluxe Edition CD-ROM, 1999-2 . . Intellectual property: protection and enforcement. For if IP law had beenuniform from country to country, there would have been no need to create aseries of IP treaties. To put it another way, where national sovereignty and a country'scontrasts or clashes with the requirements of an international governancebody, a sovereign nation-state may elect not to abide by an extranationalauthority. 18) describes WTO's intent "to provide a structure which, by itsutter flexibility, facilitates untrammeled capitalist activity everywhere,except in the few nations which have been able to build self-servingconditions into it." Access to patented pharmaceuticals has proved to be a highlycontroversial IP-related issue. "Patents and Monopolies, to Isaac Mcpherson."Jefferson's Letters. (2 1). WIPO's twofold policy mission was andremains "the protection of intellectual property," via internationalcooperation and coordination; and administering "the Paris, Berne, andother intellectual unions regarding agreements on trademarks, patents, andprotection of artistic and literary work" (World Intellectual PropertyOrganization, 2 1). La Jolla, Calif.: Britannica.com. WIPO. 2 ),who points out that from its inception in 1947 GATT provided for disputesettlement: Experience with this system over almost five decades, however, revealed a number of structural flaws that eroded its utility and effectiveness. (1979). (1984). . These issue fronts have informed theseries of international agreements governing IP dissemination as well asthe tenor of public and private discourse appertaining thereto. New York: United Nations. International law. (TRIPS) is an attempt to narrow the gaps in the way these rights are protected around the world, and to bring them under common international rules. That structure of thought anddiscourse was consistent with the fact that IP, an intangible entity, wasincreasingly seen as the core concept behind virtually the full range ofinnovative tangible artifacts, from creative and artistic to industrial andtechnological. But to connect all of those dots, it is necessary tobacktrack to the precursor international convention of the WTO per se,which was the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT, 2 1),constituted in 1947 and comprising a number of multilateral foreign-tradeagreements among 23 nations that had as their general purpose the abolitionof quotas and reduction of tariffs. United Nations and humanrights. (1999, December 8). TRIPS and public health. Despite two world wars, a host of small and midsize wars, and thepersistence of cultural and ideological disputes and geopoliticalrivalries, the 2 th century was in significant part marked by aninternationalism consistent with that formulation. Indeed, TRIPS referencesWIPO, essentially incorporating Berne and Paris, as administered by WIPO,into TRIPS by reference. World Intellectual Property Organization. WTO literature (Intellectual, 2 1) cites the growing importance of IPin foreign trade, the wide variance in enforcement of IP protections aroundthe world, and resultant cross-national economic tensions as the drivingforce behind TRIPS. Another area of WTO/TRIPS controversy deals with public image. In1833 the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property becamethe first treaty in history aimed at assisting creators of patentableindustrial products of one signatory country in obtaining protection "fortheir intellectual creations" (WIPO, 2 1) in the other signatory countriesin the form of industrial property rights (i.e., royalties, license fees). Retrieved from the World Wide Web 4 August 2 1at http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/t_agm _e.htm. Whyit happened can be traced to the context of GATT's birth, which wascoincident with the emergence of the United Nations Charter. Annex 1C of the MarrakeshAgreement Establishing the World Trade Organization, signed in Marrakesh,Morocco on 15 April 1994. As of the Uruguay Round,signatories agreed to be bound by trade rules dealing with "foreigninvestment in manufacturing, trade and investment in services andprotections for intellectual property (patents, copyrights and trademarks),and . In 1893, the Paris Union and Berne Convention were administrativelyfused under the banner of the United International Bureaux for theProtection of Intellectual Property, usually referred to by its Frenchacronym, BIRPI. In Britannica 2 1Deluxe Edition CD-ROM, 1999-2 . More generally, thelate 194 s were a period of "reaction of the internal community to thehorrors of that war and the bestiality of the regimes which unleashed it"(UN Department, 1984, p. The succession of negotiation rounds for GATT over nearly 5 yearsresulted in increasing the scope of treaty jurisdiction over member-nationeconomies beyond the initial elements of tariffs. (2 , Winter). The relevance of Jefferson'sobservation to the present research is that it articulates the core truthof geopolitical diversity in patent law, which was the original impetusbehind the first Paris Convention (just seven years after Jefferson'sdeath). Butwhatever the issue fronts, two (sometimes converging) concepts can bediscerned as having overarching importance in the often complex andsometimes fractious discourse of IP: the coordination of foreign trade andthe rule of international law (law of nations), i.e., "the body of legalrules that apply between sovereign states and such other entities as have .. Britannica 2 1 Deluxe Edition. Jefferson, T. Between 1947 and 1993, GATT was renegotiated six more times, in aseries of meetings organized as so-called rounds and scheduled somewhatirregularly, at Annecy, France, in 1949; at Torquay, England, in 1951; atGeneva in 1956 and in 196 -62; at Washington (the Kennedy Round) in 1964-67; at Tokyo in 1973-79; and at Montevideo (the Uruguay Round, 1986-94(GATT, 2 1). Agricultural (plant) patents are also included inthe purview of the agreement. (2 , January 17). transfer and dissemination oftechnology, to the mutual advantage of producers and users of technologicalknowledge and in a manner conducive to social and economic welfare, and toa balance of rights and obligations" (WTO, 1994). It was not until December1 , 1948, for example, that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights waspromulgated by unanimous vote of the United Nations General Assembly. Weissman, R. Only westerners can afford to be ill. It will be seen hereafter that howand why that is so is relevant to the administrative composition and otherfeatures of WTO. . . No such agency was forthcoming, and the followingfive decades saw a series of GATT meetings and additional foreign-trade-management agreements that had the effect of liberalizing and expandingtrade protocols. . La Jolla, Calif.: Britannica.com. 31). status acknowledged by the international community" (Schwarzenberger &Cheng, 2 1). S. As a practical matter of internationaladministration, TRIPS overtakes the Paris and Berne Conventions, whichsignatories deemed to have "inadequate" standards of protection, althoughneither of these conventions has been abandoned. Debacle in Seattle was a defeat for theworld's poor. The Berne Convention's focus on copyrightreferred to "the desire to protect, in as effective and uniform a manner aspossible, the rights of authors in their literary and artistic works"(WIPO, 1979). (2 1). 11851, 828, 3 5-388. NewStatesman, 129, 21-5. This can be attributed to the second trend, which is thatindividual cross-national issues between certain trading partners becamemore difficult to resolve according as issue fronts changed from beingarticulations of general principle to specific objectives and practices.The third trend grew out of the first two, which was the problematic issueof how agreements and/or dispute resolutions between sovereign countriesmight be enforced. C1). World Trade Organization. Golden, F. Towardscreative adaptive reuse. However, by the time of the Uruguay Round in 1994, 125 nationswere GATT signatories, an indication of general willingness to subsumenational sovereignty to the demands of GATT as "a code of conduct governing9 percent of world trade" (General, 2 1). (2 1). As one commentatorexplains: TRIPS allows governments access to pharmaceuticals at a reduced price in three ways: through compulsory licensing, in which a government can license a manufacturer to produce a drug without the permission of the patent holder; parallel importing, in which a government can shop around for bargain supplies; and generic substitution--in other words, it uses, where it exists, the cheaper generic alternative to a patent medicine (Hilton, 2 , p. Time, 157, 68. It is a point to which this research willreturn. Papersubmitted by a group of developing countries to the TRIPS Council, for thespecial discussion on intellectual property and access to medicines, 2 June 2 1. The text of TRIPS begins with a rearticulation of the basic principlesof nondiscrimination and national treatment of citizens and foreigners, aswell as a statement that the agreement strikes a balance between providingIP protection temporarily (e.g., 5 years for copyright, 2 years for apatent) as an incentive to creativity and the anticipation that eventually,when that protection has run its course, society as a whole will derivebenefit from free use of the IP. Sarkar, R. EnvironmentalAction Magazine, 26, 31-5. In Britannica 2 1Deluxe Edition CD-ROM, 1999-2 . This is shown by theexistence of the League of Nations to lesser and the United Nations togreater effect, along with a host of other geopolitical organizations thatfunctioned as deliberative, ostensibly cooperative political bodies forsovereign states. For example, it covers rental rights for such media as computersoftware, sound recordings, and films, which have been extensively piratedalmost since their inception. In Britannica 2 1 Deluxe Edition CD-ROM, 1999-2 . . . Retrieved fromthe World Wide Web 4 August 2 1, athttp://www.bitlaw.com/source/treaties/paris.html. WIPO's administrative role has expandedgreatly since 1898, when BIRPI had responsibility for monitoring fourinternational treaties; as of 1998, it was monitoring 21 such treaties(WIPO, 2 1) and was overseeing cross-national diplomatic efforts toharmonize national IP laws and protocols. World Intellectual Property Organization Internet site.Retrieved from the World Wide Web 4 August 2 1, at http://www.wipo.org. How one nation-state's custom and practice with regard to IP thatoriginates there can be reconciled with use, application, modification,and/or IP innovation by its citizens and/or by citizens of other countrieshas been the core of international IP discourse for nearly 2 years,roughly the entire span of the Industrial Revolution and the InformationRevolution that, in the 2 th century, both overlapped with and overtook it.Issue fronts range from the length of time an innovator may enjoy exclusivetitle to and rights in IP in a home country and in other countries wherethat innovator's IP is exploited, to the degree of responsibility a nation-state has for the manner in which IP is exploited inside its borders, tothe manner and extent of recourse and dispute resolution in the case ofassertions of violation of IP rights. Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary andArtistic Works. TRIPS goes beyond Paris and Berne, however. And TRIPS slouches toward globalimplementation. However, the provisions of each Union were periodicallyrenegotiated over the course of the 2 th century, to reflect considerationof emerging issues touching on everything from technology and mediadevelopment to dispute resolution. There was also the fact of mass demonstrationsthat slid into rioting and mayhem, a pattern of action that was repeated inGenoa, Italy, when the WTO met there in 2 1 (After, 2 1). Universal declaration of humanrights (1948). References Africa Group, Barbados, Bolivia, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Ecuador,Honduras, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Pakistan, Paraguay, Philippines, Peru,Sri Lanka, Thailand and Venezuela. Haleand Company. World Trade Organization's disputesettlement resolution in United States-Anti-Dumping Act of 1916. What was most substantively important about the WTO'sformation was that it created a trade-related IP protocol, TRIPS. Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property of March 2 ,1883, as Revised at Brussels On December 14, 19 , at Washington on June 2,1911, at The Hague On November 6, 1925, at London on June 2, 1934, atLisbon on October 31, 1958, and at Stockholm on July 14, 1967. As Thomas Jeffersonsaid in a letter to one Isaac McPherson that otherwise expressed skepticismtoward the notion of granting of patents and monopolies: Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from [inventions], as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. A negative effect of the internationallyuniform patent-protection system is that it makes high-priced patent-protected drugs out of reach in poor countries. The Paris Union was designed to protect "patents, utility models,industrial designs, trademarks, service marks, trade names, indications ofsource or appellations of origin, and the repression of unfair competition"(Paris Convention, 1967). The talks did notexactly collapse, but they were eclipsed by a public-opinion coalition ofenvironmental and trade-union activists, as well as "repeated descriptionsin Seattle of developing countries as employers of slave or child labor,low-wage exploiters of their own citizens and tools of corporate greed"(Flanigan, 1999, p. Retrieved from the World Wide Web4 August 2 1, athttp://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/whatis_e/tif_e/agrm6_e.htm. The context for GATT as an international code of trade-related conductwith ever-increasing reach helps explain the increase of scope: the rise ofthe global economy, compounded by the relative ease of access to it madepossible by the emergence of the Internet (Sarkar, 2 1). General agreement on tariffs and trade. . What was most important about the Uruguay Roundadministratively was that it became the mechanism for dissolving GATTaltogether and reconstituting GATT's signatories as the World TradeOrganization. The importance of WIPO's evolution as a foreign-trade-relevantadministrative entity emerged in the mid-199 s, when the World TradeOrganization was formally constituted. The origin of the World Trade Organization can be traced to twotreaties negotiated in Paris, one in 1833 and another 5 years later. It expands the scope ofcoverage to reflect changes in the ways that information and IP media areused. Between 1886 and 1979, the Berne Convention wasrenegotiated seven more times, at Paris, Berne, Berlin, Rome, Brussels, andStockholm. Controversy surrounds aspects of the WTO and TRIPS that can by andlarge be traced to a critique of the economic gap between the have and have-not nations, i.e., between developed and developing countries. (2 1, March). Essentially, therefore, the original Paris and BerneUnions have since 1974 been collapsed (or have evolved), for administrative-organization purposes, into WIPO. The PIAalso lobbied the US State Department to put South Africa on the so-called3 1 watch list of companies officially deemed unsafe for US investors.However, international public opinion came out so strongly against the suitthat it was withdrawn (Africa Group, 2 1). La Jolla, Calif.: Britannica.com. 22).When South Africa, a developing country in which there are 3-4 million HIV-positive persons, passed legislation that would legalize compulsorypharmaceuticals licensing, the Pharmaceutical Industry Association and 39of its affiliate companies sued the government of South Africa. (1994). WIPO. But the gap between richand poor nations persists, dogged by interest-group constituencies withnearly irreconcilable views. Trading Intothe Future: The Introduction to the WTO. The cross-national principle of trade withoutdiscrimination for signatories was GATT's most important mechanism. InStockholm in 1967, at a meeting of the Paris Union, agreement was reachedon a Convention reconstituting BIRPI as the World Intellectual PropertyOrganization (WIPO), which was formally constituted in 197 in Geneva andwhich became a UN agency in 1974. However, they have tangential relevance to the emergence of the WTOand TRIPS. Between 1886 and 1967, the Paris Unionwas renegotiated six more times, in Washington, The Hague, London, Lisbon,Stockholm, and Brussels. Foreign trade, which had been essentially destroyed by World War II,proved more tractable in general than a host of other postwar issues,including United Nations diplomatic apparatus. Article 7 of TRIPS articulates the objective of "promotion oftechnological innovation and . Schwarzenberger, & Cheng, B. (1943). Rationalizingforeign trade toward cooperation rather than confrontation andprotectionism, which had gained sway in the years before World War II, wasevidently perceived as one way of accomplishing this. Berne Convention. Developing world in the new millennium:International finance, development, and beyond. When there are trade disputes over intellectual property rights, the WTO's dispute settlement system is now available (Intellectual, 2 1).WTO and TRIPS, like GATT, are grounded in nondiscrimination tradingprinciples, as applied to IP. (2 1). (2 1). The Paris Union dealt substantively with licensing and royaltieson patents, trademarks, and inventions, and the Berne Convention withcopyrights (Berne Convention, 2 1; World Intellectual PropertyOrganization, 2 1). it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices (Jefferson, 194 , p. (2 1). In 196 , BIRPI transferred operations from Berne to Geneva,Switzerland, the latter being the UN's center of conference diplomacy. 1). Another fundamental principle was that of protection through tariffs rather than through import quotas or other quantitative trade restrictions; GATT systematically sought to eliminate the latter (GATT, 2 1). Los Angeles Times, C1. UN Chronicle, 37, 18. Vanderbilt Journal ofTransnational Law, 34, 47 -48 . Following are the IP areas covered by theTRIPS agreement: copyright and related rights; trademarks, includingservice marks; geographical indications (e.g., Champagne, Edam); industrialdesigns; patents; layout-designs (topographies) of integrated circuits;undisclosed information, including trade secrets (Intellectual, 2 1). What happened to GATT administratively very much paralleled theevolution of the Paris and Berne Conventions into BIRPI and the WIPO. (2 1). Morgan, J. Trading away the future. From the effective date of the agreement in 1995, developed countriesagreed to conform internal IP laws and standards to TRIPS within one year.Developing countries and so-called "transition economies," such as those ineastern Europe, were given five and least-developed countries (LDCs) elevenyears, respectively, to conform their IP laws. Citing"capitalist influence" on most postwar trade and finance agreements, Morgan(2 , p. VanderbiltJournal of Transnational Law, 34, 2 -225. It wasanticipated that GATT administration would be subsumed by a UN agencycreated for that purpose. (1967, July14). Underthat principle: each member nation opened its markets equally to every other. It isdifficult to overdramatize the geopolitical climate in which erstwhileallies and enemies were attempting to find a way through the postwar erathat would not duplicate the circumstances under which the seeds of WorldWar II had been sown in the aftermath of the Great War. The so-called Paris Union (officially International Union for theProtection of Industrial Property), negotiated in 1883, and the Berne Union(also Berne Convention), negotiated in 1886, represented amplification of,amendment to, and more complex understanding of the realm of intellectualcreations. . This research examines the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement onTrade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS). Hilton, I. (2 1, March 19). The research willset forth a brief history of how the agreement came into being and thendiscuss the major sections of the accord, as well as issue fronts thatpublic scrutiny of it has produced, with a view toward forecasting possiblelines of development. (2 1). Developing countries withoutpatent laws protecting technology have ten years to make laws offering thatprotection; however, in the case of pharmaceuticals and agriculturalchemicals, "the country must accept the filing of patent applications fromthe beginning of the transitional period" and honor exclusive marketingrights for five years or until a patent is granted (Intellectual, 2 1). (2 1, January). Over the course of revisions to these agreements, cross-national concern for patent and copyright protection per se gave way toconcern for the more general lexical category of intellectual propertyrights, or simply intellectual property (IP). 29 -1. United Nations Treaty Series, No. C1). In facilitatinge[lectronic]-commerce, the Internet as a practical matter made most nation-state borders more or less transparent and exponentially increased therelevance of knowledge/information-based commerce as well as IP tointernational trade. The matter is summed up by Beckington (2 1, p. New internationally-agreed trade rules for intellectual property rights were seen as a way to introduce more order and predictability, and for disputes to be settled more systematically. As embodied in unconditional most-favoured nation clauses, this meant that once a country and its largest trading partners had agreed to reduce a tariff, that tariff cut was automatically extended to every other GATT member. Cut-rate AIDS: Big drugmakers cave underpressure from generics. Onthe other hand, Article 31 provides that a country may issue a compulsorylicense, the name given to use of a patent without its owner'sauthorization, under such conditions as "national emergency or othercircumstances of extreme urgency or in cases of public non-commercial use"(WTO, 1994). Beckington, J. In due course, majorpharmaceutical companies slashed drug prices in South Africa by 9 % in aneffort to undercut generic-drug manufacturing there (Golden, 2 1). (1995, Winter). . TRIPS: AGREEMENT on trade-relatedaspects of intellectual property rights. GATTwas signed in 1947 and went into effect on January 1, 1948. Flanigan, J. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.