No matter what a foreign region can offer as much as far as products and markets, arguably nothing is more important to free import export trade and the flow of business than the sanctity of ideas and inventions. In order to protect that, the World Trade Organization (WTO) has an agreement on Trade-Related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).
The Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights agreement began in the 1986-94 Uruguay Round. It was the Uruguay Round that first “…introduced intellectual property rules into the multilateral trading system.” For a full list of the legal text of the TRIPS, visit WTO TRIPS site.
The basic idea behind intellectual property rights (IPR) is that, “Creators can be given the right to prevent others from using their inventions, designs or other creations — and to use that right to negotiate payment in return for others using them.” Those in business are after a profit and reward for their hard work and without any legal protection of an idea or invention, a competitor could immediately use an invention one invested time and effort into creating. If this were the case, there would be no incentive to create new technologies, since they would not reap the credit and success that is rightfully theirs.
The drawback to IPR is the balancing between the rights to an inventor to profit off of their ideas or inventions against the benefit to society the wide use of such an idea or invention can have. Intellectual property rights encourage creation and invention which is great for society. The larger benefit comes to play when the, “period of protection expires and the creations and inventions enter the public domain.”
The goal of TRIPS is to have a global standard of intellectual property rights that each member of TRIPS will respect of every other members people. This way, a patent of a US company will be protected in another market such as Europe, China, India, Japan, etc.
While members of WTO frequently agree with to the standards of TRIPS there are still some problems, most notably with the enforcement of the World Trade Organizations TRIPS in places such as China. China has been under severe scrutiny for their IPR laws and regulations. When any one member fails to uphold the IPR in their nation, it becomes the concern of every other. In China’s case, the concern is towards its “progress in imposing criminal penalties for IPR infringement, the adequacy of enforcement of IPR through administrative and civil actions, the absence of self initiated investigations and action by the Chinese authorities, the disparate treatment among domestic and foreign right holders of IPR, and the overall lack of deterrent effect under current IPR provisions.” For more on the subject of foreign enforcement of American intellectual property rights (IPR) visit USTR.gov.
While there are flaws, concerns and much room for improvement, TRIPS does overall an effective job in making inventors feel secure in their production and search for new ideas. Such an agency is necessary in a global reaching economy. Without cooperation and mutual respect of IPR, the global market would come under stress and deteriorate quite rapidly.
By – Domenic Gabriella for Trade.org
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