The TRIPs Agreement: A Guide for the South: The Uruguay Round Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights

This document aims to contribute to an understanding of the factors that prompted the proposals for the TRIPs Agreement, to outline certain aspects of the Agreement thought to be particularly important for developing countries, and to point to some of the implications for these countries. It also aims to highlight those areas in which countries are left some room for choice in formulating national legislation that accords with the TRIPs Agreement and to assess the extent to which this provides significant room for manoeuvre for developing countries.Part I briefly describes the different components of this changing field of legislation. It then outlines the factors that inspired the reform and international standardization of the intellectual property system, as crystallized in the TRIPs Agreement, and analyses some of the main shifts in the conceptualization and operation of the system. The asymmetries which characterized the process of negotiating the Agreement area also briefly discussed. Part II summarizes some of the Agreement's principal provisions and the briefness is deliberate. For those interested in more technical aspects and detailed commentary, Part II is supplemented by an Annexe commenting on selected provisions of the TRIPs Agreement. Part III points out some areas in which, despite the harmonization brought about by the TRIPs Agreement, there is apparent room for action at the national level. This section is not exhaustive and is only intended to indicate what kind of decisions can be taken at the national level. Part IV examines some of the implications of the TRIPs Agreement for developing countries. Given its broad scope and the different impact of various IPRs in different sectors and industries, it is impossible in a short document of this nature to carry out a full analysis of all the implications. For this reason the issues are illustrated by examples taken from three key areas: pharmaceuticals, plant varieties and computer programmes. Though the level of freedom to legislate in these areas is limited to different degrees by the TRIPs Agreement, the document shows the kind of analysis that developing countries should carry out in order to consider the implications of the Agreement and possible policy options. Part V contains the main conclusions of this overview of the TRIPs Agreement. The Annexe examines the contents of the TRIPs Agreement and possible ways of implementing its provisions with respect to a selected number of issues.