The Dichotomy and the Trips Agreement

Notwithstanding the development and growth of the Internet as a medium equally available to all creators-authors regardless of means, class or location; copyright law in the traditional sense remains the focus of local legislation as well as international treaties. The Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), wherein it was agreed upon during the Uruguay round of the General Agreements on Tariff and Trade (GATT) in 1999, that the goal of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is to eradicate barriers to trade and to facilitate the free transmission of ideas, people and technology, for example, is seen by some authors as being antithetical to the principles upon which the WTO was founded, which in essence is to foster competitive capitalism. Instead of liberalizing trade among all its signatories, the TRIPS supports the present state of intellectual property rights, wherein monopolies are cultivated.#1

TRIPS made possible a shift in the balance in the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) regime away from the public interest, for the benefit of which an IPR system is established, towards the monopolistic privileges of the IPR holders. TRIPS, being a binding international framework in the WTO where over a hundred states are members, has, therefore, formulated a uniform IPR system that applies same standards for differently situated member-states.

There seems to be a dichotomy created between developing and developed countries, such that it is the developing countries that experience the full brunt of the adverse effects of TRIPS provisions. Power is thus further consolidated in the rich nations, such as the United States, to control how and when books are published, the prices of printed materials and the nature of international exchange of knowledge. Altbach concludes that:
“what is needed now is an affirmative action programme to ensure that books and knowledge products are not kept from third world nations because of the restrictions of the copyright system.”#2

________________________________
#1 Martin Khor, Rethinking Intellectual Property Rights and TRIPS, in GLOBAL INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS: KNOWLEDGE, ACCESS AND DEVELOPMENT 203-212 (Peter Drahos & Ruth Mayne eds., Palgrave Macmillan 2002).

#2Altback, The Subtle Inequalities of Copyright, in COPYRIGHT AND DEVELOPMENT, 2-6 (Peter Drahos & Ruth Mayne eds., Palgrave Macmillan 2002).