The impact of the New World Order on economic development: the role of the Intellectual Property rights system
| Autor | Joseph Straus |
| Páginas | 59-73 |
59
Anuario Andino de Derechos Intelectuales.
Año VI - N.º 6. Lima, 2010
The impact of the New World Order on economic
development: the role of the Intellectual
Property rights system
JOSEPH STRAUS*
Summary: Introduction. I. The new wave of TRIPS criticism. II. What has the new WTO legal system really
achieved? III. What accounts for TRIPs-Plus and TRIPs-Minus? IV. Closing remarks and further
prospects.
INTRODUCTION
Those who have spent decades studying the field of Intellectual Property protection
will not be particularly surprised by the criticism of the international system of Intellectual
Property rights protection and of the broad view of these rights, which has been increasingly
vehement. Even though a widely surprising breakthrough in support of higher, internation-
ally binding standards of Intellectual Property protection could have been achieved with
the acceptance of the International Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual
Property Rights (“TRIPs”) in 1994, TRIPs was at the center of multifaceted criticism, for
both developing and developed countries.1 Indeed, the criticism of the developing nations
soon found support, in part, from internationally recognized economists and lawyers. It
did not go unrecognized, even by the critics, that TRIPs, together with the General Agree-
ment on Tariffs and Trade (“GATT 1994”), the Agreement on Trade-Related Investment
Measures (“TRIMs”), the General Agreement on Trade in Services (“GATS”), together and
with all their appendices, represents only one of the pillars of support of the international
legal system of the World Trade Organization (“WTO”). It also did not go unrecognized
that developing countries would only accept TRIPs in this context in order to secure access
to the markets of industrialized countries. However, it was asserted that ninety percent of
all patents are granted in industrialized states, that TRIPs negotiations are brought to an
end without a broad cost benefit analysis of, for example, welfare-related aspects of Intel-
lectual Property rights for less developed countries, and that developing countries and other
net importers of protected knowledge accept TRIPs only on political and not economic
grounds.2 It was further claimed that TRIPs was the result of a strong and coordinated
political lobby of U.S. and European industry, an “aggressive unilateralism” on the behalf
of the United States and the European Communities, and lacked a necessary legitimacy
* Originally published in the John Marshall Review of Intellectual Property Law (2006). Este artículo se
reproduce con expresa autorización del autor.
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