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This article provides information about the role of W.T.O (World Trade Organization) as a regulatory body of world trade:
The volume of trade increased substantially towards the end of 20th century and it was felt that there ought to be regulating body, which looks in to trade agreements between countries. After World War II there was an attempt to set up an International Trade Organisation (ITO), which never materialised but in 1947 there was body, which came in to existence called the GATT-General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.
Image Courtesy : upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Jakarta_WTO_protest1.jpg
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It did not take long for the General Agreement to give birth to an unofficial, de facto international organisation, also known informally as GATT. Over the years GATT evolved through several rounds of negotiations. The last and largest GATT round was the Uruguay Round, which lasted from 1986 to 1994 and led to the WTO’s creation. Whereas GATT had mainly dealt with trade in goods, the WTO and its agreements now cover trade in services, and in traded inventions, creations and designs.
There are a number of ways of looking at the WTO. It’s an organisation for liberalising trade. It’s a forum for governments to negotiate trade agreements. It’s a place for them to settle trade disputes. It operates a system of trade rules. At its heart are the WTO agreements, negotiated and signed by the bulk of the world’s trading nations. These documents provide the legal ground-rules for international commerce. They are essentially contracts, binding governments to keep their trade policies within agreed limits.
Although negotiated and signed by governments, the goal is to help producers of goods and services, exporters, and importers conduct their business. Some of the basic principles that WTO involves are trade without discrimination, free trade through lowering trade barriers, general agreement on trade and services, trade related intellectual property rights etc. Critically examine the rules and regulations to regulate patents. Ideas and knowledge are now considered as an important part of trade relations. Patents, copyrights are awarded to people and organisation to protect their creative and innovative inputs into product or process.
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“Creators can be given the right to prevent others from using their inventions, designs or other creations and to use that right to negotiate payment in return for others using them. These are ‘intellectual property rights’. They take a number of forms. For example books, paintings and films come under copyright; inventions can be patented; brand-names and product logos can be registered as trademarks; and so on. Governments and parliaments have given creators these rights as and incentive to produce ideas that will benefit society as a whole. The extent of protection and enforcement of these rights varied widely around the world; and as intellectual property became more important in trade, these differences became a source of tension in international economic relations”.
The following areas are covered under the TRIPs agreement:
Copyright and Related Rights:
Under this category, the rights of authors and artist of literary works such as, books and other writings, musical compositions, paintings, sculpture, computer programmes and films, are protected by copyright, for a minimum period of 50 years after the death of the author. Also protected through copyright and related rights are the rights of performers (e.g. actors, singers and musicians), producers of phonograms (sound recordings) and broadcasting organisations.
The TRIPs agreement ensures that computer programmes will be protected as literary works under the Berne Convention and outlines how databases should be protected. It also expands international copyright rules to cover rental rights. Authors of computer programmes and producers of sound recordings must have the right to prohibit the commercial rental of their works to the public. A similar exclusive right applies to films where commercial rental has led to widespread copying, affecting copyright-owners’ potential earnings from their films.
Trademarks:
The agreement defines what types of signs must be eligible for protection as trademarks, and what the minimum rights conferred on their owners must be. It says that service marks must be protected in the same way as trademarks used for goods. Marks that have become well known in a particular country enjoy additional protection.
Geographical Indications: A place name is sometimes used to identify a product. This “geographical indication” does not only say where the product was made. More importantly, it identifies the product’s special characteristics, which are the result of the product’s origins. Well-known examples include “Champagne”, “Scotch”, “Tequila”, and “Roquefort” cheese. Wine and spirits makers are particularly concerned about the use of place-names to identify products, and the TRIPs Agreement contains special provisions for these products.
But the issue is also important for other types of goods. Using the place name when the product was made elsewhere or when it does not have the usual characteristics can mislead consumers, and it can lead to unfair competition. The TRIPs Agreement says countries have to prevent this misuse of place names.
Industrial Design:
Under the TRIPs Agreement, industrial designs must be protected for at least 10 years. Owners of protected designs must be able to prevent the manufacture, sale or importation of articles bearing or embodying a design, which is a copy of the protected design.
Patents:
The agreement says patent protection for inventions must be available for at least 20 years. Patent protection is available for both products and processes. Governments can refuse to issue a patent for an invention if its commercial exploitation is prohibited for reasons of public order or morality.
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They can also exclude diagnostic, therapeutic and surgical methods, plants and animals (other than microorganisms), and biological processes for the production of plants or animals (other than microbiological processes). Plant varieties, however, must be protectable by patents or by a special system (such as the breeder’s rights provided in the conventions of UPOV — the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants.
If a patent is issued for a production process, then the rights must extend to the product directly obtained from the process. Under certain conditions alleged infringers may be ordered by a court to prove that they have not used the patented process. In the recent Doha meeting (of WTO) it agreed that the TRIPs Agreement does not and should not prevent members from taking measures to protect public health.
They underscored countries’ ability to use the flexibilities that are built into the TRIPs Agreement. And they agreed to extend exemptions on pharmaceutical patent protection for least-developed countries until 2016. On one remaining question, they assigned further work to the TRIPS Council — to sort out how to provide extra flexibility, so that countries unable to produce pharmaceuticals domestically can import patented drugs made under compulsory licensing. A waiver providing this flexibility was agreed on 30 August, 2003.
Integrated Circuit Design:
This particular item and area was adopted in 1989 but it is yet to come in to force. The protection for this is available for 10 years.
Undisclosed Information Including Trade Secrets:
Trade secrets and other types of “undisclosed information” which have commercial value must be protected against breach of confidence and other acts contrary to honest commercial practices. But reasonable steps must have been taken to keep the information secret. Test data submitted to governments in order to obtain marketing approval for new pharmaceutical or agricultural chemicals must also be protected against unfair commercial use.
On the face of it seems perfectly valid that there should be uniform laws that can be applied equally for all trading partners but the TRIPs agreement has come from severe criticism from developing and least developed countries. They feel that the gradual erosion of the developed countries’ supremacy in manufacturing and technology, due to the rise of the Asian countries as competitors has prompted industries and companies from the North to become pressure groups, which have been behind the agreements.
“The industrial lobbies convinced developed country governments on the need to link trade with IPRs, in order to prevent imitation and to increase returns on research and development. Monopoly rights granted by IPRs were regarded as crucial to prevent the developing countries from further undergoing the ‘catching-up’ process towards industrialisation based on imitating and copying technologies, as the developed countries themselves had done. In other words, IPR protection was a tool to guarantee the comparative advantage that had so far ensured the developed countries’ technological supremacy”.