Intellectual Property & Development: Towards a Strategy (original) (raw)
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Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights: A Concise Guide to the TRIPS Agreement
1996
There does not seem to be a widely held view among WTO members of the proper role and scope of TRIPS. One of the main reasons why TRIPS is controversial is because it allocates rights in innovation, some would say beyond the bounds of what a trade agreement should seek to do. The lines of the debate are often conceptualized in terms of 'developing' versus 'developed' country differences. One of the major areas of disagreement is how TRIPS deals with rights in biotechnology. Some developing countries are relatively rich in biodiversity and traditional knowledge but poor in capital and scientific expertise, while some developed countries are headquarters to firms developing this biodiversity and traditional knowledge into commercially exploitable forms of intellectual property. This paper examines how the European Community comes to this debate. It reviews the institutional history of the positions of the European Community and other WTO members during the ministerial conferences succeeding the Uruguay Round. It examines European law relating to biotechnological innovation, in search of European policy coherence on the subject. It also explains the European view of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the European Community's take on how the CBD relates to TRIPS. The European Community position on TRIPS coverage of biotechnological innovation does not depart significantly from the United States position or from the position of the Quad group of countries generally. Given the highly contentious nature of the subject and the sometimes-vociferous developing country opposition to strong intellectual property protection, it is likely that TRIPS and biotechnology will be one of the more hotly contested topics of the Doha Round.
This article considers the impact of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) in developing countries. After an initial phase of ''paper compliance'' with TRIPS, followed by efforts to manage the welfare costs of its implementation, a number of developing countries are looking at ways to optimize the implementation or reimplementation of the agreement to foster domestic competitiveness and innovation. One part of the equation involves attracting technology-intensive foreign direct investment. Another involves enhancing local innovation potential. Surfing the wave of outsourcing, which increasingly targets higher knowledge functions, a number of developing countries are becoming globally competitive innovators and displacing the geographical centres of innovation, with substantial political and economic impacts.
Journal of International Management, 2019
Indices that approximate for the quality and strength of intellectual property (IP) systems are commonly used as variables in empirical international management studies. However, while international IP systems have radically transformed after the implementation of the TRIPS agreement, these contextual changes have not been accounted for in existing international management research approaches. This study examines the institutional context of IP systems in the post TRIPS implementation years by conceptualizing how IP Law on the books (regulations) and IP Law in practice (enforcement) combine. This enables the identification of two new contextual categories of IP systems that have not been conceptually, theoretically, or empirically captured in existing international management research. A review of the existing literature on indices measuring different aspects of national IP systems provides insights into how to improve future theoretical and empirical international management work that aims to study the effects of the context of IP systems in the post TRIPS era.
Protection of Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation, and Development
Knowledge Generation and Protection, 2009
Knowledge embedded as a proportion of the total value of a product grows by the day in all sectors. Technological development is not only present in industrial goods but also in agricultural processes and in services. Capabilities for research, creation, and appropriation of knowledge and its transformation into new technologies form part of the foundations of wealth in the most developed nations and largely explain their economic growth. In this regard, analysis and debate on how to generate knowledge, technological innovation, and development is a topic of utmost importance for the developing countries. As of the entry into effect of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) in 1995, the architecture of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) has gradually become more complex. TRIPS has been promoted mainly by the most developed nations, and bilateral trade agreements have progressively incorporated diverse complementary rules, some of them known as TRIPS Plus for extending intellectual property beyond the original TRIPS. The mechanisms for intellectual property protection-patents, trademarks, geographical indications, copyright, breeder rights, etc.-present two important aspects: on the one hand, they are forms of appropriation of income that generate monopolistic or quasi-monopolistic gains for their holders and, on the other, they are financial incentives for research inasmuch as they remunerate the innovator for the investments carried out until succeeding in turn their innovations into market products. Both aspects are examined in this chapter.