Fifteen years after the WTO TRIPS Agreement entered into force, international IP law and policy have moved on. Since the mid-nineties, countries interested in higher IP standards have successfully shifted IP negotiations away from WIPO and WTO towards Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). The trend...

In international law, the concept of sustainable development has an ambiguous meaning and several distinct connotations. Amongst those, the principle of integration and reconciliation of economic, social and environmental aspects functions as its core element. This principle finds support in...

Policy Makers, commentators and scholars increasingly realise the impact (international) intellectual property (IP) protection has beyond incentivising investment in innovation and creativity. IP also touches upon areas of general societal concern such as public health, access to information,...

As a framework regulation for innovation markets, the patent system needs to be tailored to the innovation process, which it is supposed to serve, and to the competitive environment, within which it must operate. In order to ensure an efficient functionality of the patent system as an innovation...

Enforcing intellectual property rights abroad is difficult. International treaties have generally not created directly enforceable IP rights. Usually, the protection they confer cannot be directly invoked in national courts. Because of the territorial nature of IP protection, right holders must...

This paper contains the outline, as well as the introductory and concluding chapters of a monograph on the protection of intellectual property (IP) in the wider context of international law (OUP, 2016). Against the background of the debate about norm relations within and between different rule...

This paper considers legal implications that are likely to emerge from the implementation of a TRIPS Waiver decision. Assuming that a Waiver is adopted in the form presented in the May 2021 proposal by South Africa and India et al, we review the interaction between the Waiver and other...