2017 Articles

Session III: Issues Concerning Enforcement and Dispute Resolution (Antony Taubman)

Taubman, Antony

I’m not going to talk about the law, or the interpretation of the law, so much as the ideas behind the law. It’s very rare that I’m let loose in a law faculty so I’m going to talk rather abstractedly, partly as a bureaucratic defense but also because I think there are some very interesting abstract ideas that come up in this discussion about dispute settlement that are worth thinking about. The idea of a TRIPS Agreement—we’re still debating what are those “trade related aspects” of intellectual property rights. I like to say, essentially TRIPS reframed the international law of intellectual property by saying that indeed, IP is trade-related. In other words, when there are trade negotiations, when there are trade disputes, when there are trade relations generally, IP is on the table, is on the agenda.3

And that’s the transformation that we’re seeing washing through the system, not merely multilaterally, but in the RTAs and the bilateral agreements, too, that we’ve been talking about.