Home > Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights

The enactment of TRIPs in 1994 was an unprecedented and effectively mandatory globalisation of intellectual property law. Although subsequent developments ( see below) have expanded on TRIPs' requirements, the agreement itself remains without doubt the most important international agreement on copyright, patents and other IP rules.

1 The Requirements of TRIPs

TRIPs requires member states to provide strong intellectual property rights in many of these areas. For example, under TRIPs:

• Copyright terms must extend to 50 years after the death of the author (although films and photographs are only required to have fixed 50 and 25 year terms, respectively).
• Copyright must be granted automatically, and not based upon any "formality", such as registrations or systems of renewal.
• Computer programs must be regarded as "literary works" under copyright law and receive the same terms of protection.
• National exceptions to copyright (such as " fair use" in the United States) must be tightly constrained.
• Patents must be granted in all "fields of technology" (regardless of whether it is in the public interest to do so).
• Exceptions to patent law must be limited almost as strictly as those to copyright law.
• In each state, intellectual property laws may not offer any benefits to local citizens which are not available to citizens of other TRIPs signatories (this is called " national treatmentNational treatment is a debated (and perhaps abandoned) principle in customary international law, but a vital one to many treaty regimes. Under national treatment, if a state grants a particular right, benefit or privilege to its own citizens, it must als"). TRIPs also has a most favoured nation clause.

Many of the TRIPs provisions on copyright were imported from the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic WorksThe Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works sometimes called the Berne Union or Berne Convention adopted at Berne in 1886, first established the recognition of copyrights between sovereign nations. It was developed at the instig and many of its trademark and patent provisions were imported from the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial PropertyThe Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property signed in Paris, France, on March 20, 1883, is an important and one of the first intellectual property treaties. Thanks to this treaty, intellectual property systems, including patents, of any.

2 Background and History

TRIPs was added to the General Agreement on Tariffs and TradeGeneral Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (usually abbreviated GATT functions as the foundation of the WTO trading system, and remains in force, although the 1995 Agreement contains an updated version of it to replace the original 1947 one. The GATT, as an i (GATT) at the end of the Uruguay RoundThe Uruguay Round was a trade negotiation lasting from September 1986 to April 1994 which transformed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade into the World Trade Organization. It was launched in Punta del Este in Uruguay (hence the name), followed by of trade negotiations in 1994. Its inclusion was the culmination of a program of intense lobbying by the United States, supported by the EU, Japan and other first world states. Also influential were campaigns of unilateral economic encouragement (under the Generalized System of PreferencesThe Generalized System of Preferences (or GSP is a program managed by the USTR to grant trade advantages (such as reduced tariff levels) to particular developing countries, in cases where the United States is pleased with policy directions taken by those) and coercion (under Section 301 of the Trade Act). In turn, the United States strategy of linking trade policy to intellectual property standards can be traced back to the entrepreneurship of senior management at Pfizer in the early 1980s, who mobilised US corporations and made maximising intellectual property privileges the number one priority of US trade policy.

After the Uruguay round, the GATT became the basis of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Since ratification of TRIPs is a compulsory requirement of WTO membership, any country which wishes to obtain easy access to the numerous international markets opened by the WTO must enact the very strict intellectual property laws mandated by TRIPs.

Furthermore, unlike other international agreements on intellectual property, TRIPs has a powerful enforcement mechanism. States which do not adopt TRIPs-compliant intellectual property systems can be disciplined through the WTO's dispute settlement mechanism, which is capable of authorising trade sanctions against dissident states.