Globalising Intellectual
Property Rights
The World Trade Organisation has responsibility for intellectual property rights including patents, copyrights and trademarks on a global scale under the auspices of the TRIPs Agreement (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights). This Agreement has profound implications for the commercial interests of global corporate actors and for access to technology in developing countries.
In Globalising Intellectual Property Rights , Matthews looks at various aspects of the TRIPs Agreement agenda-setting, legal interpretation, implementation, enforcement and revision from the viewpoint of both global business interests and developing countries. It is argued that the Agreement was largely the result of an initiative by multinational companies who sought to protect their own intellectual property rights through international law and, furthermore, that it is these multinational companies who are now its main guardians. The book concludes that the history of the TRIPs Agreement and the role of business is a clear example of governance by non-state actors on a global scale.
This book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of international relations, intellectual property law, international economic law and development studies.
Duncan Matthews is a lecturer in the School of Law at the University of Warwick. He has written widely on intellectual property rights, environmental policy and the single European market.
Routledge/Warwick Studies in Globalisation
Edited by Richard Higgott and published in association with the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation, University of Warwick.
What is globalisation and does it matter? How can we measure it? What are its policy implications? The Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation at the University of Warwick is an international site for the study of key questions such as these in the theory and practice of globalisation and regionalisation. Its agenda is avowedly interdisciplinary. The work of the Centre will be showcased in this new series.
This series comprises two strands:
Warwick Studies in Globalisation addresses the needs of students and teachers, and the titles will be published in hardback and paperback. Titles include:
Globalisation and the AsiaPacific
Contested territories
Edited by Kris Olds, Peter Dicken, Phillip F. Kelly, Lily Kong and
Henry Wai-chung Yeung
Regulating the Global Information Society
Edited by Christopher Marsden
Banking on Knowledge
The genesis of the global development network
Edited by Diane Stone
Historical Materialism and Globalisation
Essays on continuity and change
Edited by Hazel Smith and Mark Rupert
Civil Society and Global Finance
Edited by Jan Aart Scholte with Albrecht Schnabel
Towards a Global Polity
Edited by Morten Ougaard and Richard Higgott
Routledge/Warwick Studies in Globalisation is a forum for innovative new research intended for a high-level specialist readership, and the titles will be available
in hardback only. Titles include:
1 Non-State Actors and Authority in the Global System
Edited by Richard Higgott, Geoffrey Underhill and Andreas Bieler
2 Globalisation and Enlargement of the European Union
Austrian and Swedish social forces in the struggle over membership
Andreas Bieler
3 Rethinking Empowerment
Gender and development in a global/local world
Edited by Jane L. Parpart, Shirin M. Rai and Kathleen A. Staudt
4 Globalising Intellectual Property Rights
The TRIPs Agreement
Duncan Matthews
First published 2002 by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.
2002 Duncan Matthews
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN 0-203-16568-3 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-26025-2 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 041522327X (Print Edition)
Series editors preface
The Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation (CSGR) ( www.csgr.org ), founded in October 1997, is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) of the United Kingdom. It has rapidly become an international site for the study of key issues in the theory and practice of globalisation and regionalisation. The Centres agenda is avowedly interdisciplinary: research staff are drawn from international relations, political science, economics, law and sociology. Committed to scholarly excellence, the Centre also strives to be problem-solving in methodological orientation.
Three broad categories of activity inform and underwrite the research programme of the Centre: (a) What is globalisation? (b) Can we measure its impacts, and if so, how? and (c) What are its policy implications? Understandings of globalisation are seen to be multidimensional political, economic, cultural and ideological so CSGR sees globalisation in at least two broad ways. First, as the emergence of a set of sequences and processes that are increasingly unhindered by territorial or jurisdictional barriers, and which enhance the spread of transborder practices in economic, political, cultural and social domains. Second, as a discourse of political and economic knowledge offering one view of how to make the postmodern world manageable. For many, globalisation as knowledge (both accepted and contested) constitutes a new reality. Centre research asks what kinds of constraints globalisation poses for independent policy initiative on the part of national policy-makers, and under what conditions these constraints are enhanced or mitigated.
Within these broad contexts, empirical work at CSGR focuses on:
1 particular regional projects in Europe, North America and the AsiaPacific;
2 the enhancement of international institutions, rules and policy competence on questions of trade competition and international finance and investment; and
3 normative questions about governance, sovereignty, democratisation and policy-making under the constraints of globalisation.
Indeed, Centre research is sensitive to the wider normative nature of these questions, especially when considering the counter-tendencies towards, or sites of resistance to, globalisation at international, regional and local levels that give rise to different understandings of the importance of space and territoriality. Routledge/Warwick Studies in Globalisation provides an avenue for the publication of scholarly research monographs, policy-oriented studies and collections of original themed essays in the area of the research agenda of CSGR.
