ABSTRACT
The value of intellectual property is not confined neatly within national frontiers and the activities of the infringer can spread across many countries. The earliest attempts to protect within one country the intellectual property of another took the form of bilateral agreements between two states. Some states built up extensive networks of bilateral agreements, often as part of wider commercial treaties. The Paris Convention on industrial property (that is, mainly patents) of 1883 marked the beginning of a new phase, this time of multilateral agreements. It was followed three years later by the Berne Convention, concerned with the rights of authors. Since that time a considerable number of multilateral conventions, treaties or agreements have extended the transnational protection of most kinds of intellectual property on a worldwide, or more strictly limited, basis. The word transnational rather than international has been used in the title of this chapter for only in a few cases do we see any genuinely international protection. Rather there is national protection guaranteed by international agreement: each separate state applies its own law but undertakes to provide the protection of its laws for the intellectual property of other states. The various international agreements in the field of copyright and in other fields of intellectual property will be described in this chapter. Many, but not all, of these are administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and a mention of that organization's activities will be included. The work of the European Union in this field fits most easily into this chapter rather than elsewhere and will also be dealt with.
