2017 Articles

Session IV: Fair Use and Other Exceptions (Jonathan Band)

Band, Jonathan

So we’ve decided, we bought into international treaties—Berne—fine. You then have the next issue: okay, we’re not only part of these international treaties adopted by the Berne Convention of the World Intellectual Property Organization and so forth but we are also now a part of this, the WTO and TRIPS, and that’s ultimately the real subject of today’s conference is not international agreements but international trade agreements, and IP and international trade agreements, and that’s again been this underlying theme and that’s a very different thing. Because you obviously have the United States and other large countries [who] have much more leverage in a trade negotiation because you have other countries who want market access and so in exchange for market access they need to make a lot of concessions, and so you could say, you could really question whether that’s a good idea.