on were periodically renegotiated over the course of the 20th century, to reflect consideration of emerging issues touching on everything from technology and media development to dispute resolution. Between 1886 and 1967, the Paris Union was renegotiated six more times, in Washington, The Hague, London, Lisbon, Stockholm, and Brussels. Between 1886 and 1979, the Berne Convention was renegotiated seven more times, at Paris, Berne, Berlin, Rome, Brussels, and Stockholm.
The Paris Union was designed to protect "patents, utility models, industrial designs, trademarks, service marks, trade names, indications of source or appellations of origin, and the repression of unfair competition" (Paris Convention, 1967). Agricultural (plant) patents are also included in the purview of the agreement. The Berne Convention's focus on copyright referred to "the desire to protect, in as effective and uniform a manner as possible, the rights of authors in their literary and artistic works" (WIPO, 1979). Over the course of revisions to these agreements, cross-national concern for patent and copyright protection per se gave way to concern for the more general lexical category of intellectual property rights, or simply intellectual property (IP). That structure of thought and discourse was consistent with the fact that IP, an intangible entity, was increasingly seen as the core concept behind virtually the full range of innovative tangible artifacts, from creative and artistic to industrial and technological. The more complex the innovation, the more complex IP discourse and issue fronts became, given the persistence of different modalities of nation-state response to IP issues. For if IP law had been uniform from country to country, there would have been no need to create a series of IP treaties.
IP entitlements and rights within the meaning of international agreements refer to compensation meant to be paid for the use of industrial and intellectual uni...