World Trade Organization and TRIPS

The origin of the World Trade Organization can be traced to two treaties negotiated in Paris, one in 1833 and another 50 years later. In 1833 the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property became the first treaty in history aimed at assisting creators of patentable industrial products of one signatory country in obtaining protection "for their intellectual creations" (WIPO, 2001) in the other signatory countries in the form of industrial property rights (i.e., royalties, license fees).

The so-called Paris Union (officially International Union for the Protection of Industrial Property), negotiated in 1883, and the Berne Union (also Berne Convention), negotiated in 1886, represented amplification of, amendment to, and more complex understanding of the realm of intellectual creations. The Paris Union dealt substantively with licensing and royalties on patents, trademarks, and inventions, and the Berne Convention with copyrights (Berne Convention, 2001; World Intellectual Property Organization, 2001). The Paris and Berne Unions were by no means the only intellectual-property treaties

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pting to find a way through the postwar era that would not duplicate the circumstances under which the seeds of World War II had been sown in the aftermath of the Great War. Rationalizing foreign trade toward cooperation rather than confrontation and protectionism, which had gained sway in the years before World War II, was evidently perceived as one way of accomplishing this. More generally, the late 1940s were a period of "reaction of the internal community to the horrors of that war and the bestiality of the regimes which unleashed it" (UN Department, 1984, p. 1). Foreign trade, which had been essentially destroyed by World War II, proved more tractable in general than a host of other postwar issues, including United Nations diplomatic apparatus. It was not until December 10, 1948, for example, that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was promulgated by unanimous vote of the United Nations General Assembly. GATT was signed in 1947 and went into effect on January 1, 1948. It was anticipated that GATT administration would be subsumed by a UN agency created for that purpose. No such agency was forthcoming, and the following five decades saw a series of GATT meetings and additional foreign-trade-management agreements that h
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Uruguay Round, WTO TRIPS, Berne Convention's, Information Revolution, Isaac McPherson, TRIPS Developing, TRIPS WTO, Assembly GATT, South Africa, Paris Berne, intellectual property, world trade, united nations, paris berne, berne convention, intellectual property organization, world intellectual, property organization, paris union, issue fronts, world trade organization, trade organization, world intellectual property, 4 august 2001, retrieved world wide,
Approximate Word count = 3799
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)

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