Even before the World Trade Organization (WTO) lurched into its current state of crisis, bilateral FTAs had become a tool of choice for corporate and state interests seeking to expand intellectual property rights (IPR) standards. IPRs confer monopoly rights over intangible goods and services — methods of doing business on the internet, trademarks, computer programmes, designs, manufacturing processes, drug formulations or types of rice. They give IPR owners the right to prevent anyone from making or using their "creation". As such, they provide companies a direct tool to control a portion of the market, to block out competition and to fence off territories. Ironically, while IPR chapters are key aspects of many “free” trade and investment agreements, they are little more than protectionism for transnational corporations (TNCs), administered by governments. TNCs argue that without monopolies, there will be no innovation. Sharing should be banned; only capitalistic trade based on exclusive private property should be the norm.
Through FTAs, bilateral investment treaties (BITs) and other forms of direct agreements between countries, the US and Europe are insisting that the partner country adopt their standards of IPR protection and enforcement. This process has happened multilaterally via the WTO and the World Intellectual Property Organization. But it is now being pushed very aggressively through unilateral, bilateral and regional agreements — deals which go much further than the WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related aspects of Intellectual Property rights (TRIPs). FTAs are setting “TRIPs-plus” standards.
Through IPRs, corporations seek monopoly control over vast areas of life. They expect that we should all regularly pay them licenses to use their products and to reimburse their research and development costs. Never mind all the public subsidies, tax breaks, university contract labour and so on that go into their research and development in the first place. IPR laws being pushed through bilateral channels make it public policy that countries should protect the TNCs, the real pirates.
Because of the serious implications that ‘TRIPs-plus’ IPR chapters of FTAs have for broad cross-sections of societies, in some anti-FTA struggles, such as the fightback against the US-Thailand FTA, farmers and people living with HIV/AIDS have joined together in their opposition of this new threat to their survival. Concerns have also been raised about the way in which the EU’s EPAs include TRIPs-plus provisions, while Indigenous Peoples in many countries continue to assert alternative frameworks for the use and sharing of traditional knowledge that challenge the capitalist, commodified logic of “intellectual property rights” enshrined in free trade and investment agreements.
More recently, a new development in transnational IPR enforcement has sparked opposition and controversy, including major protests in many European cities. In October 2011, after a secretive negotiations process, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was signed by a number of countries and will come into effect once six countries have ratified it. ACTA would potentially set up a new international legal framework for enforcing IPR. Opponents have criticized the agreement’s impact on privacy, freedom of expression and internet freedoms, and generic drug manufacturing.
Dr Othoman Mellouk is a Moroccan treatment advocate who has been working on intellectual property and access to medicines for more than a decade.
A wide-ranging list of international nongovernmental organisations issued a letter to European Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström opposing a proposal to establish a “watch list” of countries deemed failing to protect European intellectual property.
By treating IP laws as just another football in the America vs. China rivalry, Trump misses the way elites in both countries can use malformed trade policy to undercut workers in both countries.
US-led multilateral trade agreements have forced poorer foreign countries to honor patents in exchange for the benefits of bringing multi-national corporations—and their factory jobs—abroad.
The US government’s role as a leader of the international intellectual property system is under self-imposed threat.
19-Dec-2017 IP Watch Intellectual property rights in trade – to be rethought?
After two decades of intellectual property regimes in trade agreements, one could have some second thoughts.
“I’d be concerned that USTR is pressuring Thailand to take pro-pharma positions on the RCEP and TPP,” Knowledge Ecology International Executive Director James Love said.
A substantive new study with contributions from a range of leading thinkers in the field of intellectual property rights delves into the history and future of mega-regional trade agreements and the evolution of IP rights.
The U.S. dairy sector is fighting harder than ever on several fronts to halt the European Union’s global efforts to block cheese producers in other countries from using names like Roquefort, Asiago and Gorgonzola on the products they export.
Trade agreements between countries have a perceivable impact on access to medicines as a result of changes in patent and other national laws in different countries.
Granting data exclusivity for clinical trials would undermine access to medicines.
DNP+ and MSF Access Campaign India have set up a blog about the ongoing negotiations of a number of multi- and bilateral free trade agreements, which harm the access to essential medicines.
IP Watch is a Geneva-based initiative to report on the interests and ‘behind the scenes’ dynamics which influence intellectual property policies, including those carried through bilateral and regional trade agreements.
Media Trade Monitor is a resource pool for information about the impact of global, regional, and bilateral trade agreements on media, culture, and communication.