Trips-plus conditions, which impose standards beyond TRIPS, have also been verified. [38] These free trade agreements contain conditions that limit the ability of governments to introduce competition for generic drug manufacturers. In particular, the United States has been criticized for promoting protection far beyond the standards prescribed by the TRIPS. The U.S. free trade agreements with Australia, Morocco and Bahrain have expanded patentability by making patents available for new uses of known products. [39] The TRIPS agreement authorizes the granting of compulsory licences at the discretion of a country. The terms of trips plus in the U.S. Free Trade Agreement with Australia, Jordan, Singapore and Vietnam have limited the application of mandatory licences to emergencies, remedies for cartels and abuse of dominance, and cases of non-commercial public use. [39] The Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement is an agreement of international law between all World Trade Organization (WTO) member states.
It sets minimum standards for the regulation of different forms of intellectual property by national governments, as is the case for nationals of other WTO member states. [3] The TRIPS agreement was negotiated at the end of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) between 1989 and 1990[4] and is managed by the WTO. An agreement reached in 2003 relaxed domestic market requirements and allows developing countries to export to other countries with a public health problem as long as exported drugs are not part of a trade or industrial policy. [10] Drugs exported under such regulations may be packaged or coloured differently to prevent them from affecting the markets of industrialized countries. Since the TRIPS agreement came into force, it has been criticized by developing countries, scientists and non-governmental organizations. While some of this criticism is generally opposed to the WTO, many proponents of trade liberalization also view TRIPS policy as a bad policy. The effects of the concentration of WEALTH of TRIPS (money from people in developing countries for copyright and patent holders in industrialized countries) and the imposition of artificial shortages on citizens of countries that would otherwise have had weaker intellectual property laws are common bases for such criticisms. Other critics have focused on the inability of trips trips to accelerate the flow of investment and technology to low-income countries, a benefit that WTO members achieved prior to the creation of the agreement. The World Bank`s statements indicate that TRIPS have clearly not accelerated investment in low-income countries, whereas they may have done so for middle-income countries. [33] As part of TRIPS, long periods of patent validity were examined to determine the excessive slowdown in generic drug entry and competition. In particular, the illegality of preclinical testing or the presentation of samples to be authorized until a patent expires have been accused of encouraging the growth of certain multinationals and not producers in developing countries.
With the TRIPS agreement, intellectual property rights have been integrated into the multilateral trading system for the first time and remains the most comprehensive multilateral IP agreement to date.