Intellectual Property - International Ip

INTERNATIONAL IP

Economic globalization and international e-commerce have had profound effects on the status of intellectual property in the global arena. Complications are acute for copyright, and encompass problems of legal jurisdiction, difficulties of enforcement, and countries with widely divergent levels of intellectual property protection. The most widely reported international IP infringement was piracy. Many observers remark that globalization will force the increasing standardization and convergence of intellectual property laws internationally.

Numerous bilateral and multilateral treaties govern international copyright. The fundamental treaty for copyright protection remains the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. Dating from 1886, the Convention grants authors exclusive rights to control the reproduction, public performance, broadcast, and adaptation of their works. The U.S. did not join the Berne Convention until 1988.

Many European countries extend stronger copyright protection than does the U.S. These include the recognition of authors' "moral rights" in a work, which are separate from economic rights. Moral rights include the rights to be recognized as a work's creator, to shield a work from distortion, to retract or amend content, and to decide whether a work should be published at all.

The leading international authority on intellectual property law is the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which administers relevant international treaties and helps settle international disputes. WIPO unveiled two major intellectual property treaties in 1996: the Performances and Phonograms Treaty and, more importantly, the Copyright Treaty. The latter extended Berne Convention protection to digital works, classifying computer programs as literary works. It expanded the basic notion of copyright to embrace the "right of communication," including online transmission. It also contained the earliest regulations prohibiting the circumvention of measures designed to protect copyrighted works, such as encryption and digital-rights management systems.

The most wide-ranging international legislation was the 1994 Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) Agreement. It sets forth comprehensive, minimum standards of international intellectual property protection that largely favor protection over the free flow of information. TRIPs contains mandatory enforcement procedures and sanctions for the failure to implement them. TRIPs prohibits preferential measures for developing countries, which were held to full compliance after a five-year transitional period. Critics argue that such provisions will place developing countries, which often lack even rudimentary intellectual property protection regimes, at an even greater disadvantage in the global e-commerce arena.