The terms of the TRIPS Plus Agreement, which prescribe standards that go beyond the TRIPS Agreement, were also discussed. [38] These free trade agreements contain conditions that limit the ability of governments to introduce competition for generic manufacturers. In particular, the United States has been criticized for pushing protection far beyond the standards prescribed by the TRIPS Agreement. U.S. free trade agreements with Australia, Morocco, and Bahrain have expanded patentability by mandating the availability of patents for new uses of well-known products. [39] The TRIPS Agreement allows for compulsory licensing at a country`s discretion. U.S. free trade agreements with Australia, Jordan, Singapore, and Vietnam have limited the application of compulsory licenses to emergencies, antitrust remedies, and cases of non-commercial public use. [39] The 2002 Doha Declaration reaffirmed that the TRIPS Agreement should not prevent Members from taking the necessary measures to protect public health. Despite this recognition, less developed countries have argued that flexible travel arrangements, such as licensing. B mandatory, are almost impossible to apply. Less developed countries, in particular, cited their nascent domestic manufacturing and technology industries as evidence of the brutality of politics. The TRIPS Agreement is an agreement on minimum standards that allows Members to provide more comprehensive protection of intellectual property if they so wish.
Members are free to determine the appropriate method for implementing the provisions of the Agreement in their own legal system and practice. The Agreement also takes into account the different positions of the Member States in terms of relative economic status, administrative capacity and technological base. As in other WTO agreements, developing countries have received special and differential treatment under Part VI of the Agreement under the “transitional arrangements”. While industrialized countries have been able to comply with compliance up to 1. In January 1996, developing and post-communist countries had four more years to achieve this (five more years were granted for new patented products). In accordance with Article 66, paragraph 1, the least developed countries (LDCs) had until 2006 to adopt the TRIPS Agreement with the possibility of further extensions; The 2001 Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health subsequently authorized an additional ten years for medicines for least developed countries (WTO, 2001). At the same time, Article 66(2) explicitly encourages the transfer of technology from developed to least developed countries in order to support the creation of a viable technological base, and Article 67 obliges industrialised countries to provide technical and financial assistance to facilitate the implementation of the Agreement. In addition to the basic intellectual property standards created by the TRIPS Agreement, many countries have concluded bilateral agreements to introduce a higher standard of protection. This set of standards, known as TRIPS+ or TRIPS-Plus, can take many forms. [20] The general objectives of these agreements are as follows: Daniele Archibugi and Andrea Filippetti[34] argue that the importance of the TRIPS Agreement in the process of producing and disseminating knowledge and innovation has been overestimated by its promoters. This point has been supported by the United Nations` findings, which suggest that many countries with weak protections regularly benefit from high levels of foreign direct investment (FDI). [35] An analysis of OECD countries in the 1980s and 1990s (in which the patent term of medicines was extended by 6 years) showed that while the total number of registered products increased slightly, the average innovation index remained unchanged.
[36] In contrast, Jörg Baten, Nicola Bianchi and Petra Moser (2017)[37] find historical evidence that compulsory licensing – a key mechanism for weakening intellectual property rights covered by Article 31 of Travel – can indeed be effective in promoting inventions in certain circumstances by increasing the threat of competition in areas with low levels of competition. However, they argue that the benefits of weakening intellectual property rights depend heavily on the ability of governments to credibly commit to using them only in exceptional emergencies, as companies can invest less in research and development if they anticipate repeated episodes of compulsory licensing. .