25/11/2019
What is the Trips Agreement ?
TRIPs is the 1st Trade Related Agreement administered by the World Trade Organization in 2015. It cuts across several aspects of business where intellectual property protection contributes to technical innovation and the transfer of technology. Producers and users of the business creations benefit whilst economic and social welfare is enhanced, mostly, in favor of the intellectual creators in a knowledge-based economy.
Trade types include scalping, day trading, momentum trading, swing trading and position trading whilst international trade covers export-, import- and entrepot trade.
Trips include digital era issues covering electronic business transactions which use the internet. Examples are online payments, real time gross settlements, email, twitter and e-sales of products and services.
The Agreement is a minimum standards system, which allows its members, to provide more extensive protection of their intellectual property rights if they so wish; a given where members freely determine the appropriate method of implementing the provisions of the Agreement within their own legal system and practice.
In doing so, Trips specifies enforcement procedures, remedies, and dispute resolution procedures mainly in intellectual property rights. The rights being to make, distribute, license, export, import or broadcast goods and services. The rights are associated with or emanate from protected patents, copyright, industrial designs, trademarks, plant varieties, trade dress, geographical indications, and in some jurisdictions trade secrets.
During Internet 1.0, the World Trade Organization negotiators agreed on a new kind of Multilateral Trade Agreement 'Trade 2.0', that trade and intellectual property are interrelated - hence the advent of the Trips Agreement. The said Agreement gave rise to e-business transactions since trade graduated from national barter trade to transnational, trans-regional, and trans-continental to international trade using the internet. In the process, this saw a rise in trade in digital products.
Consequently, the way we communicate, transact business and share content, the way in which we assess the value of goods, and the way that we conduct transactions in goods through trade all dramatically changed for the faster and better than years before. Thus; TRIPs and the Internet facilitated an ease of doing business environment in a modern world, where business transactions are effected on real time basis with standard goods and services timely provided.
The TRIPs main features are therefore: standards, enforcement and dispute settlement whilst TRIPS plus provisions include extending the term of a patent longer than the twenty-year minimum, or introducing provisions that limit the use of compulsory licences or that restrict generic competition. One of these provisions is known as data exclusivity.
In benefit terms, the TRIPs includes reduced tariffs, import quotas, and regulations. Lower trade barriers allow members larger markets for their goods. In turn, larger markets lead to greater sales, more jobs, and faster economic growth.
In 1948, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs sought to expand international trade by eliminating or reducing quotas, tariffs, and subsidies whilst preserving significant regulations for each member state of the WTO.
In its trade related investment measures (TRIMs), the Trips recognizes that certain investment measures can restrict and distort trade. Meanwhile, WTO members may not apply any measure that discriminates against foreign products or that leads to quantitative restrictions, both of which violate basic WTO principles.
Cliford Chimombe is the Head of Section at Zimbabwe Intellectual Property Office. He writes as passion to educate the Zimbabwean nation on IP matters.
(c) Nov. 21, 2019
