ABSTRACT
Norms prescribing the protection of inventions, innovations, products and technologies have existed for more than five centuries, the oldest ones dating as far back as Renaissance Italy. The protection of intellectual property (IP) was, however, considered an issue of domestic politics in the same way as the protection of physical property until the twentieth century. Although the first international conventions on intellectual property were signed in the nineteenth century (the Paris and the Berne Conventions), they only established general guidelines of international standards of IP protection, and provided no enforcement mechanisms. With the growth of knowledge-intensive industries such as the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, information technologies, computer software, and with the globalisation of trade and services, businesses began to demand higher levels of intellectual property protection and international safeguards for their scientific and technological breakthroughs. In 1994 the member states of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) signed an agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property (TRIPs), which established international norms for the protection of intellectual property rights under the mandate of the newly created World Trade Organisation (WTO). The TRIPs agreement regulates such diverse areas as the protection of patents, copyright, trademarks, utility models, industrial designs, geographical indicators, collective marks, certification marks and trade secrets.1 One of the industries affected by the agreement is the pharmaceutical industry, which has attracted a lot of public attention in relation to the effects of TRIPs on the availability and affordability of essential medicines. The application and effects of the norm protecting all knowledge created in the pharmaceutical sphere has raised a number of issues of ethical, social, political, economic and legal character and has since 1994 not been completely implemented due to constant opposition from developing countries and various civil society organisations.
