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This working paper is a lightly edited transcript of a CREATe public lecture delivered at the University of Glasgow on 28 November 2018. The World Trade Organization TRIPS Agreement established multilateral rules on "trade related aspects of intellectual property", purporting to do away with distortions and impediments to trade, and to establish a benchmark for adequate and effective intellectual property protection. It posits a positive-sum relation between the producers and users of technological knowledge. These rules were drawn up a generation ago in Geneva, exactly where and when the World Wide Web was in the process of being invented. The Web epitomises the technological developments – the digital disruptions – that have revolutionised the ways in which intellectual property is formed, regulated, managed and traded; yet the TRIPS Agreement was concluded at a time when creative content was mostly embedded in physical media, and almost exclusively counted as trade in goods. New business models for the creative industries and new technology platforms for the distribution of content have outpaced regulatory, legislative processes, let alone the capacity of multilateral rules to be adapted and updated to respond to these developments. Recent bilateral and regional deals – negotiated expressly outside the multilateral sphere – have sought to define and promote digital trade. This working paper reviews the abiding significance of the TRIPS Agreement for trade in creative content against the fundamental shift from trade in physical carrier media to trade in network data packets: is TRIPS somehow 'wired' – a timely trade pact that foreshadowed the growth in trade in IP as a valued good in itself; or 'tired' – rooted in a bygone set of assumptions about how IP is traded; or indeed 'expired', superseded by fundamental technological shifts and subsequent trade deals? The paper concludes by reflecting more broadly on what the impact of technological disruption can tell us about the essential relationship between the ...

This article reviews how the international environment shapes international patent law and practice with bearing on biomedical innovation. The cluster of issues is encapsulated in two core paradoxes. The first concerns how public goods, such as new pharmaceuticals, may be produced through the deliberate creation of private rights that exclude material from the public domain. The second paradox concerns how "technological neutrality" and overall policy balance in the application of general patent law principles requires technology-specific interventions by regulators. The article illustrates how centrifugal and centripetal trends influence diverse national approaches to applying patentability criteria for pharmaceutical products.

The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC) took up intellectual property (IP) issues in 1995, quite late in the evolution of its program of regional economic cooperation, and even then with a measure of caution and uncertainty. The way APEC has handled cooperation on IP issues shows how its priorities and modalities have shifted expediently to respond to political and economic developments, and exemplifies two broad themes in APEC's evolution: . first, the question of scope and objectives – whether APEC is to deliver 'hard' trade liberalisation outcomes of lowering or eliminating tariff barriers, or is to concentrate on softer, less precise outcomes in the field of economic cooperation, trade facilitation and regulatory and administrative convergence, conceived in a broader, less legalistic and more collaborative sense, including on areas traditionally reserved for domestic regulation; and . second, the changeable relationship of the regional process with multilateral trade negotiations, both the Uruguay Round negotiations leading up to the World Trade Organization (WTO) package of trade agreements, and subsequent WTO negotiations –APEC has been variously viewed as a defensive hedge against multilateral failure, a decisive shift away from multilateralism to regionalism, a regional caucus on multilateral issues, a preliminary deal-making mechanism to facilitate multilateral outcomes, and other less determinate forms of regional economic integration, with suggestions even that is antithetical to free trade and provides implicit support for an Asian brand of mercantilism. The very informality, flexibility and even ambivalence that make possible this range of perceptions of APEC – through such consciously pliable constructs as 'open regionalism,' 'concerted unilateralism,' 'early voluntary sectoral liberalisation,' and 'pathfinding initiatives,' and a culture of valuing consensus and soft policy convergence over hard normative outcomes - have at once been viewed as the distinctive, defining strength of APEC and as its abiding weakness. APEC is either an innovative experiment in 'new regionalism' or as an inadequate substitute for tough, binding liberalisation commitments. Given that APEC is at any time a consensus expression of the will and preoccupations of its member economies, the deliberate (almost constitutional) eschewal of institutional compliance mechanisms (apart from soft means such as peer pressure and normative lock-in), the need to react to a shifting multilateral climate, and the economic diversity and geographical extent of APEC, this uncertainty or changeability of focus and of ambition is inevitable. Yet this leaves open a debate as to the core nature of the APEC endeavour, and the suspicion that its function is to forge an Asia-Pacific regional identity as an achievement of value in itself – the process itself being the outcome. This applies to broader systemic issues, but especially to the continuing uncertain position of intellectual property (IP) issues in international trade and economic relations. Despite the incorporation of IP standards within trade rules through the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), IP remains a contested element of the multilateral trade law system, and an uncertain component of regional economic cooperation. Rreflectinged this indefinite position of IP rules in trade and economic relationsambivalence, APEC's work on IP issues has been less about compliance with formal obligations as an end in itself, and more about exploring cooperative approaches to implementing international standards for mutual benefit. In this context, TRIPS serves more as a framework for regional cooperation on IP – or a lexicon for policy dialogue – aimed at achieving regional goals for economic and regulatory cooperation, rather than as an adversarial compliance-oriented legal instrument born of trade tensions: regional cooperation as a tentative step towards the 'collective management' of TRIPS. The collective management of TRIPS, consciously expressed as an ideal, would combine a collaborative, mutually supportive approach to the articulation of domestic IP policies within the TRIPS framework for optimal economic and social outcomes and the enhancement of regional economic relations, with enforcement of trading partners' IPRs undertaken collaboratively as a performance of positive comity, rather than as a grudging concession in a zero-sum deal struck between atomistic protagonists.