Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement :

With the establishment of the world trade Organization (WTO), the importance and role of the intellectual property protection has been Crystallized in the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Systems (TRIPS) Agreement. It was negotiated at the end of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) treaty in 1994.

The general goals of the TRIPS Agreement are contained in the Preamble to the Agreement, which reproduces the basic Uruguay Round negotiating objectives established in the TRIPS area by the 1986 Punta del Este Declaration and the 1988-89 Mid-Term Review. These objectives include the reduction of distortions and impediments to international trade, promotion of effective and adequate protection of intellectual property rights, and ensuring that measures and procedures to enforce intellectual property rights do not themselves become barriers to legitimate trade.

The TRIPS Agreement encompasses, in principle, all forms of intellectual property and aims at harmonizing and strengthening standards of protection and providing for effective enforcement at both national and international levels. It addresses applicability of general GATT principles as well as the provisions in international agreements on IP (Part I). It establishes standards for availability, scope, use (Part II), enforcement (Part III), acquisition and maintenance (Part IV) of Intellectual Property Rights. Furthermore, it addresses related dispute prevention and settlement mechanisms (Part V). Formal provisions are addressed in Part VI and VII of the Agreement, which cover transitional, and institutional arrangements, respectively.

The obligations under TRIPS apply equally to all member states. However developing countries were allowed extra time to implement the applicable changes to their national laws, in two tiers of transition according to their level of development. The transition period for developing countries expired in 2005. For least developed countries, the transition period has been extended to 2016, and could be extended beyond that.

The TRIPS Agreement, which came into effect on 1 January 1995, is to date the most comprehensive multilateral agreement on intellectual property. The areas of intellectual property that it covers are:

(i) Copyright and related rights (i.e. the rights of performers, producers of sound recordings and broadcasting organisations);

(ii) Trade marks including service marks;

(iii) Geographical indications including appellations of origin;

(iv) Industrial designs;

(v) Patents including protection of new varieties of plants;

(vi) The lay-out designs (topographies) of integrated circuits;

(vii) The undisclosed information including trade secrets and test data.