The terms of the TRIPS Plus Agreement, which prescribe standards other than TRIPS, were also reviewed. [38] These free trade agreements contain conditions that limit the ability of governments to introduce competition for generic manufacturers. In particular, the United States has been criticized for pushing protection far beyond the standards prescribed by the TRIPS Agreement. U.S. free trade agreements with Australia, Morocco, and Bahrain have expanded patentability by requiring patents to be available for new uses of known products. [39] The TRIPS Agreement allows for compulsory licensing at a country`s discretion. The terms of the TRIPS Plus Agreement in the U.S. free trade agreements with Australia, Jordan, Singapore, and Vietnam have limited the use of compulsory licenses to emergencies, antitrust remedies, and non-commercial public use cases. [39] The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) is an international agreement between all Member States of the World Trade Organization (WTO).
It establishes minimum standards for the regulation of various forms of intellectual property (IP) by national governments, as applied to nationals of other WTO member states. [3] The TRIPS Agreement was negotiated at the end of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) between 1989 and 1990[4] and is administered by the WTO. No, the TRIPS Agreement requires Members to comply with certain minimum standards for the protection of intellectual property rights contained therein. In addition, members wishing to make use of certain options provided for in the agreement must inform the Council. The standard line in support of the TRIPS Agreement stems from the recognition of the contemporary importance of the knowledge-based economy and private intellectual property as the main component of international trade (WTO, 2008:39). Disagreements and the lack of protection of intellectual property rights constitute important non-tariff barriers to trade, and the TRIPS Agreement is the result of the need for a strong multilateral framework to replace an ineffective patchwork of existing agreements on intellectual property rights[i] (Matthews, 2002:10-12). This is the first time that travel has introduced a global minimum standard for the protection of intellectual property, which all WTO members must respect. This includes copyrights, trademarks, designs, geographical indications, patents, integrated circuit designs, trade secrets and anti-competitive contractual restrictions. Like other WTO agreements, it applies the basic principles of non-discrimination – most-favoured-nation treatment (no discrimination between trading partners) and national treatment (domestic aliens have the same treatment as their own nationals). However, the TRIPS Agreement is based on a certain conception of intellectual property as an idea, and this internationalization can be problematic.
This may be in the narrow sense that different societies place a higher priority on the public good on a variety of issues, and more broadly, that some forms of “traditional knowledge” (traditional knowledge) shared by indigenous communities do not conform to the codified Western model of individual and exclusive ownership (Michalopoulos, 2003: 17-18). Recent advances in products of biotechnology have highlighted this contrast: for Western proponents, modern genetic research aimed at improving human well-being is a highly respectable “bioprospecting”, a form of intellectual property that falls within the framework of the TRIPS Agreement. For indigenous peoples, on the other hand, the patenting of frozen resources such as neem extract[ii] can be seen as a form of “biopiracy” and represents the “dishonest repackaging of traditional knowledge to guarantee monopoly rents for biopirate, while excluding the original innovator from claiming these rents” (Isaac & Kerr, 2004). At present, the TRIPS Agreement does not provide an agreed interpretation of what constitutes traditional knowledge or how it should be protected (ICRP, 2002b:73-87). The notifications referred to in Articles 1.3 and 3.1 shall be circulated in the IP/N/2/- document series. Further background information on these reporting options is available in document IP/C/W/5. Reviews are at the heart of the TRIPS Council`s role in monitoring what is happening under the agreement. It may also clarify or interpret the provisions of the Agreement. This has not happened in most cases. A 2005 WHO report found that many developing countries have not included in their legislation TRIPS flexibilities (compulsory licensing, parallel importation, data protection restrictions, use of large-scale research and other exceptions to patentability, etc.) to the extent permitted by Doha. [16] The general transitional periods apply to founding members of the WTO, i.e.
governments that were members on 1 January 1995 […].