The Minimum Protection Standards&Its Implementation In Developing Countries In The Post-TRIPS Era

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. In addition, the author also puts forward his own advices on how developing countries fulfill the Agreement.This paper firstly introduces the research background and purposes. Part II 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 III outlines some important terms of the Agreement that build up the minimum standards’framework. Part IV examines some of the implications of the TRIPS Agreement for developing countries. TRIPS Agreement has significant influences as to nearly all aspects of developing countries’social and economic development, such like local innovation, technology transfer, foreign direct investment (FDI), foreign trade, etc.. However, because of different sectors, industries or different categories of intellectual property, the extents to which the Agreement influences them are not identical. In a short document of this nature, the issues are illustrated by examples taken from three key areas:pharmaceuticals, computer programmes and plant varieties. 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 examines the contents of the TRIPS Agreement and possible ways of implementing its minimum standards with respect to a selected number of issues. Part VI contains the main conclusions inferred by this document.