The Recent Developments And Our Country’s Countermeasures Of The Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement

With the rapid development of international trade, the types and fields of international trade have been expanded from physical goods to service and intellectual property field. International trade has been closely linked with the intellectual property and related issues have also become a widespread concern all over the world, such as anti-counterfeiting and anti-piracy problems. As for the issue, the international community has made numerous bilateral or multilateral agreements about international intellectual property rights (IPR) protection. The Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) which was signed in October,2011is the latest legislative trend in the IPR protection. And ACTA is the latest development in the IPR protection in the form of plurilateral mechanism. To study the change of the international IPR protection system is beneficial to systematically understand the background and reasons of ACTA and is of more vital significance to accurately grasp the further progress of international IPR protection in the future.The paper is mainly divided into six sections:The first chapter reviews and summarizes the domestic and foreign research status and sums up major research areas and central issues in order to find blank fields and contents for intensive study. Then put forward the main research direction and problems.The second chapter generalizes the shifting process of the international IPR protection from multilateralism to bilateralism or unilateralism, and then to plurilateralism. The international IPR protection shifted from BIRPI to WIPO and then to TRIPS, indicating that the establishment of international IPR protection system has become mature. It was the first time for TRIPS to link the IPR and international trade and make the minimum standards of the international IPR protection in the world. Since then, in order to maintain the advantages of IPR, the developed countries began to implement the "TRIPS-Plus" clause within the WTO system. At the same time, the developed countries are committed to other international organizations to improve the standard of IPR (e.g., the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Customs Organization (WCO)). The international IPR protection transformed from the multilateral system represented by TRIPS to bilateral system represented by bilateral free trade agreement (FTA) and unilateralism. Breakthrough under the multilateral and bilateral systems both ended with failures, so the developed countries have to seek solutions out of the two systems. However, the ACTA is the beginning.The third chapter elaborates the contents of ACTA which surpass the contents of TRIPS. Deeply study the concrete terms of ACTA text and highlight the major differences between the ACTA texts and TRIPS clauses and summarize the surpass contents and then make appropriate judgments.The fourth chapter discusses the afterwards ACTA era "ACTA returns in different ways", namely, some provisions in ACTA were incorporated into some subsequent free trade agreements. The way to enhance the IPR protection standards is accepted and developed by more and more international agreements. The impacts are more than those of the ACTA validation. The ACTA is gradually becoming a hidden template. The paper mainly introduces how TTIP, CETA and TPP imitate and surpass ACTA to revive and upgrade in an all-round way. This chapter also summarizes the ACTA"s essence from four aspects, such as industrial upgrading, national security, global value chain and innovation landscape.The fifth chapter summarizes underlying impacts on China’s export trade. Most scholars study the influence caused by ACTA for China from macro perspective. This paper focuses on the exports of the major negotiating nations of ACTA and the status of infringing goods seized by American Customs in order to have a better understanding of the impacts caused by ACTA with specific data.The chapter six mainly elaborates the countermeasures to deal with the revival and upgrading of ACTA from the perspectives of enterprise and government. In the enterprise perspective, constantly push the enterprises to shift to the global value chain; strengthen the industry-University-institute cooperation and make full use of the main role of business innovation; master the independent IPR across the world; raise the proportion of foreign patent application; take effective strategy to address "patent trolls". In the government perspective, learn from the practice of experienced countries in the world, formulate long-term development strategy of IPR, and give full play to the government leading role.