The International Intellectual Property Law System: New Actors, New Institutions, New Sources

Abstract

It is now ten years since the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement was concluded, subsuming that seemingly comprehensive intellectual property treaty into the institutional apparatus of the World Trade Organization (WTO). For many ob servers, TRIPS and the WTO established the framework of a new international intellectual property system. They were the center of the new system, into which other institutional com ponents would feed, and from which other institutions would draw their agenda. The norms that TRIPS and the WTO articulated would inform all aspects of international intellectual property lawmaking. Indeed, around that time, a group of scholars published a collection of essays under the title GATT or WIPO, contemplating the extent to which the WTO would displace the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) as the dominant institution of international intel lectual property law. Ten years on, the answer to that question is neither the WTO, nor WIPO. It is the WTO WWIPO