Intellectual property means the legal rights which result from intellectual activity in the industrial, scientific, literary and artistic fields. Intellectual property is traditionally divided into two branches, industrial property and copyright.
The objectives of protecting intellectual property are to encourage invention, investment in innovation, and disclosure of new technology, and to recognize and reward the innovator.
The World Trade Organization's (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, the TRIPS Agreement, which came into effect on January 1, 1995, is to date the most comprehensive multilateral agreement on intellectual property. It covers all traditional areas of intellectual property that: copyright and related rights, trademarks, geographical indications, industrial designs, patents, the layout-designs of integrated circuits, and undisclosed information including trade secrets and test data.
The TRIPS Agreements sets minimum standards of protection of IPR, to be provided by the members of WTO. Each member must comply with the substantive obligations of the main conventions of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). In addition, the TRIPS Agreement adds a substantial number of additional obligations on matters where the pre-existing conventions have seen as being inadequate.
The TRIPS Agreement gives all WTO Members transitional periods so that they can meet their obligations under it. The transitional periods depend on the level of development of the country concerned. Developed country Members have had to comply with all of the provisions of the TRIPS Agreement since January 1, 1996. For developing countries, the general transitional period is five years, i.e. until January 1, 2000. For those countries on the United Nations list of least-developed countries, the transitional period is eleven years. The TRIPS Agreement has forced many developing countries to start modifying their IPR systems. More generally, globalization, expansion of international trade and competition, increased foreign direct investment, and growing international pressure, have also compelled many developing countries to enhance their IPR protection.
In recent years, the biotechnology revolution has raised concerns relating ethics, bio-safety and IPR. The TRIPS Agreement calls for the protection of microorganisms and microbiological processes for the production of plants and animals. The rights of patent holders include the right to exclude others from making, using, selling, importing or stocking the patented process, and also extend to rights over the product directly obtained from the patented process. The problem here posed by IPR, is the balancing of the need of private investors to have IPR to recoup their investments and the need of the poor and future generations to have access to relevant science and suitable products. Biotechnology affects directly the work of the World Bank Group, especially in the area of agriculture.
In addition to the traditional intellectual property rights, there is an emerging area of newer rights, not always considered as IPR but nevertheless directly analogous. These include the Convention on Biological Diversity, "farmer's rights", and traditional resource rights of indigenous peoples.
With the radical advances made in biotechnology in recent years and the substantial commercial benefits obtained by some developed country firms, frequently using IPR based on genetic resources from developing countries, the issues of genetic resources have become politically mixed with those of IPR, and there has been an important debate on the question of sharing the benefits of these resources with the developing countries. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), signed at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, was in part the result of this debate. The CBD reaffirms that countries have sovereign rights over their own biological resource, including genetic resources, and calls for the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources.
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Updated as of February 23, 2007 |
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