Intellectual Property Rights, the WTO and Developing Countries: The TRIPS Agreement and Policy Options

Capital & Class, Spring 2002 by Dennis, Alex

Carlos M. Correa Intellectual Property Rights, the WTO and Developing Countries: The TRIPS Agreement and Policy Options Zed Books, London and New York, 2000, pp. 265 ISBN 1-856-49737-2 (pbk) L16.95 ISBN 1-856-497364 (hbk) L45.00

The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) established international `minimum standards' on copyright, trademarks, patents, trade secrets and so on. Retaliative action, including such punitively protectionist measures as the implementation of export quotas, against states that breach its terms are now enshrined in international law. According to Correa, a concern with four developments motivated the agreement's implementation:

1. The growing importance of cutting-edge technologies underlying international competition.

2. The increasing difficulty of maintaining exclusive knowledge about such new technologies, particularly software and integrated circuits, partly-and ironically-as a consequence of previous developments in the field.

3. A process of reductions in protectionist legislation, facilitating the direct exportation of high-technology products and reducing the need to exploit patented inventions locally.

4. Falling competitiveness of us companies, understood as being the result of the increasing strength of the Asian NICs and of overseas piracy and counterfeiting.

The background to the agreement, therefore, is more a function of us protectionism than of a desire to protect the intellectual 'rights' of scientists and other `knowledge workers'. This would appear to be merely the latest permutation of a traditional theme: the extent to which `national interests' are served by opening up the barriers to `free trade'. An issue that needs addressing, therefore, is the extent to which the TRIPS agreement can be understood in class terms. Are the interests of national capital in developed nations and/or transnational corporations being asserted against workers in the form of developments in international law? And, furthermore, to what extent might cooperation and collaboration between knowledge workers and others be genuinely subversive of those interests?

Correa's text fails to address questions of this kind. Although the interests being represented by the TRIPS agreement are mentioned in passing-- in particular, the extent to which us interests are congruent with, or opposed to, those of other states-his discussion takes place exclusively in the particularly narrow framework of international law. The agents of development and change represented in Correa's discussion are not classes, companies or even individuals-but are nation states, understood in terms of an a priori distinction between 'developing' and 'developed' nations. Furthermore this discussion is formatted around two opposing sets of strategies and interests: protectionism and the promotion of `free trade'. What decisions are made, therefore, seem to have to be ones made at the level of national policy, and the extent to which such policy may or may not be 'representative' of other, particular, interests remains unexamined. Ultimately, the picture being painted is one of the TRIPS agreement potentially allowing developing nations to oppose the interests of us capital by recourse to frameworks of international legislation.

Compliance with the Agreement's minimum standards shall ensure a high level of protection in most areas of IPRS [intellectual property rights]. Such standards should also constitute a basis to avoid tensions emerging from discrepancies among WTO Member States on IPRS, thus eliminating the use of unilateral standards and contributing to the development of a climate of increased and beneficial international cooperation (p. 121).

This book does not discuss questions of property and ownership as they face either intellectuals or the organisations they work for. Instead, it emphasises the capacity of nation states to intervene (in whose interests?) in disputes, against a background assumption of some kind of trickle-down fairness. What this might mean at the level of working conditions and standards of living remains unclear and, to the extent that the discussion rarely strays far from the wording of the TRIPs agreement itself, this book is unlikely to clarify such matters.

Alex Dennis is an occasional contributor to Capital & Class and works at the University of Huddersfield.