Twenty-five years since TRIPS: Patent policy and international business
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EDITORIAL
Twenty-five years since TRIPS: Patent policy and international business Suma Athreye1, Lucia Piscitello2,3 and Kenneth C. Shadlen4 1
Essex Business School, Southend-on-Sea, UK; Henley Business School, Reading, UK; 3 DIG, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy; 4 London School of Economics, London, UK 2
Correspondence: S Athreye, Essex Business School, Southend-on-Sea, UK e-mail: [email protected]
Abstract In this introduction to the special issue, we take stock of the impact of the TRIPS agreement on international business in the hyper-globalised world of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. We begin by providing a brief background on TRIPS, putting it in the historical context of international agreements on intellectual property (IP) and then looking at the logic of national patent policies, examining how policies may vary across countries, in theory, and reviewing literature that discusses the factors driving historical variation, in practice. We review the key issues in the domestic politics of implementation as the new rules migrate from the international to national levels. Lastly, we consider the implications of TRIPS for the governance of innovations in industries based on ICT and where ICT has enabled global value chains (GVCs), where the speed and distributed nature of innovation makes IPR simultaneously less effective and more necessary. Journal of International Business Policy (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s42214-020-00079-1 Keywords: TRIPS agreement; patent policies; de jure and de facto IPR; patents and global value chains
INTRODUCTION The Uruguay Round of trade negotiations, which began in 1986 and concluded in 1994 with the signing of the Marrakesh Agreement by all 123 negotiating countries, was notable for numerous reasons, including the formal integration of intellectual property rights into international trade rules. When the World Trade Organization (WTO) was launched in 1995, a product of the Uruguay Round, one of its main pillars would be the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). TRIPS is not the first international agreement on intellectual property (IP); the Paris Convention (patents), Madrid System (trademarks), and Berne Convention (copyright) have existed since the late 1800s.Yet TRIPS can be understood as marking a fundamental break in a variety of ways. TRIPS is much deeper and more granular, placing external constraints on many more dimensions of national IP policy than previous agreements had. Beyond establishing shared commitments to basic principles, as previous international accords had done, TRIPS, in a detailed set of articles, includes specific prescriptions and proscriptions for national policy.1 Notwithstanding its title, TRIPS addresses national IP
Twenty-five years since TRIPS
measures regardless of whether these are ‘‘traderelated.’’ TRIPS is also stronger and more binding than previous agreements, as the costs of noncompliance are substantial. Because the inclusion of TRIPS in the WTO means that it i
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