After the TRIPS Agreement came into effect, less developed countries were very dissatisfied with the international intellectual property system. Commentators usually attributed this dissatisfaction to the TRIPS Agreement, which had been in effect for ten years. Although this connection is correct, it is not Developed countries are more dissatisfied with the entire WTO system than with the TRIPS agreement. This section focuses primarily on the bargaining model, but also touches on the ignorance model and the self-interested model. The coercion model has been largely ignored because, taken literally, it assumes that the international trading system is inherently unfair and prone to resentment by less developed countries. .
If the TRIPS agreement was the product of bargaining, some would say that what the less developed countries did was a bad or even a failed deal. Although developed countries have promised to reduce tariffs and subsidies in agriculture and the textile industry in exchange for stronger intellectual property protection and easier market access, they have not fulfilled this commitment. This is especially true at the recent WTO Cancun meeting. Less developed countries have begun to wake up and are unwilling to negotiate on issues such as investment, competition policy, government procurement, and trade facilitation. To take a step back, even if less developed countries get what they want in the TRIPS negotiations, they will still be losers: the 21st century is an era dominated by a knowledge economy rather than agriculture or manufacturing. The gains of less developed countries in the fields of agriculture and textiles cannot make up for their losses in the fields of intellectual property and information technology. Making concessions in the fields of intellectual property and information technology requires less developed countries to catch up with developed countries using outdated competition models.
Some people do not agree with this statement, believing that countries can use strong protection of intellectual property rights to achieve economic "leapfrog growth." For example, when describing the self-interest model, Professor Kitch believes that there are sufficient reasons. Adopting strong protection for intellectual property rights, however, scholars and commentators are far from empirically proving how strong protection is beneficial to less developed countries and enhances global welfare. In fact, many commentators, especially those scholars who support the coercion model, believe that although the existing intellectual property system has become more and more popular due to the support of strong economic and military power, it does not reflect universal value. Rather, it was successfully transplanted to less developed countries because they were not strong enough and had suffered colonial rule in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
It is very bad to have no support from experience, because the intellectual property system needs to be balanced, and over-protection is just as dangerous as under-protection. Professor Rochelle Dreyfuss pointed out that "the production of knowledge is an accumulation. Unless creators can freely use existing works and create on the basis of them, the warehouse of information cannot be enriched." [ii] If the protection is excessive, intellectual creators will not have enough Without sufficient raw materials to create, the public does not have enough channels to obtain the information and knowledge they need; on the contrary, if protection is insufficient, intellectual creators will not have enough motivation to create, and will be more willing to engage in other jobs with higher returns. What's worse is that an inappropriate intellectual property system will harm less developed countries more than developed countries, because the latter have the corresponding resources and legal mechanisms to reduce the impact of the unbalanced system, while the former does not Differently, they do not have strong economic power and complete legal mechanisms to solve the problems caused by the imbalanced system. Even if the system is beneficial in the long run, they lack the necessary wealth, technology and infrastructure to take advantage of the system in the short term. opportunities brought about.
From this point of view, it is not surprising that less developed countries are concerned about the strong protection required by the TRIPS Agreement and the negative impact on agriculture, health, environment, education, and culture. However, dissatisfaction has not followed TRIPS The agreement ends. Today, many developed countries, such as the United States and EU members, have begun negotiations around the TRIPS Agreement to improve the level of protection and seek so-called "TRIPS" protection. Bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements place more emphasis on the issues of concern to the contracting parties themselves and can resolve issues between the contracting parties more quickly, which has its own advantages.
However, as the bargaining model shows, bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements still plague those countries that have to join the TRIPS Agreement to avoid unilateral sanctions, because most of the negotiated items of free trade agreements are outside the TRIPS Agreement, and the TRIPS Agreement There is no way to exempt them from trade sanctions, so in terms of unilateral sanctions, the situation of less developed countries is no better than if they had not joined the TRIPS Agreement.
In addition, the increased use of technological protection measures by intellectual property rights holders in developed countries has also attracted the attention of policymakers in less developed countries. By applying these alternative protection measures, rights holders in developed countries block resources that might otherwise be open to less developed countries. For example, the 1996 WIPO "Internet Convention" requires the adoption of measures to prohibit the circumvention of technological protection measures to protect works in the digital environment; another example is the use of Gene Usage Restriction Technology (GURT) or "terminal" technology to make seeds unable to reproduce, so that they cannot grow. Second generation crops.
In short, the TRIPS agreement contains many reasons why less developed countries are dissatisfied with the existing international intellectual property system. However, the agreement itself cannot lead to the current dissatisfaction. The TRIPS free trade agreement, technology protection measures and other new The development of the system has further aggravated the dissatisfaction of less developed countries.