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The TRIPS Agreement: How much room for maneuver?

The access to and use of information and technology for development is subject to intellectual property rights. During the past decade, particularly with the adoption of the TRIPS Agreement, the rights of intellectual property right (IPR) holders have been expanded and strengthened. This is likely to affect the scope and modalities of access to information and technologies needed for development. This paper examines, in Section 1, the main characteristics of the TRIPS Agreement. Section 2 presents the ways in which World Trade Organizations (WTO) member countries have used the flexibility left by the Agreement at the national level in order to promote a competitive access to goods and technologies. It examines, in particular, the use of parallel imports, exceptions to exclusive rights and compulsory licenses for that purpose. Section 3 briefly analyses the criteria of interpretation applied under the WTO dispute settlement system in TRIPS-related cases, while Section 4 discusses the normative implications of the Agreement in countries in different levels of development and in selected sectors.