Home | Databases | WorldLII | Search | Feedback Edited Legal Collections Data

Xue, Hong --- "Enforcement for Development: Why Not an Agenda for the Developing World?" [2009] ELECD 370; in Li, Xuan; Correa, M. Carlos (eds), "Intellectual Property Enforcement" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2009)

Book Title: Intellectual Property Enforcement

Editor(s): Li, Xuan; Correa, M. Carlos

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848446526

Section: Chapter 7

Section Title: Enforcement for Development: Why Not an Agenda for the Developing World?

Author(s): Xue, Hong

Number of pages: 24

Extract:

7. Enforcement for development:
why not an agenda for the
developing world?
Hong Xue1

INTRODUCTION

Enforcement has become a new battlefield in international intel-
lectual property law. While insistently consolidating enforcement
in their legal system, which is most clearly exemplified by the
United States' Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and
the European Union's Directive on the Enforcement of Intellectual
Property Rights (Enforcement Directive), the developed countries
are steadily pushing their enforcement agenda to the developing
world. A score of developing countries have been sued at the Dispute
Settlement Body (DSB) of the World Trade Organization (WTO)
for not only the issue of protection but enforcement of intellectual
property.2 An Enforcement Agenda has been put on the table of the
World Intellectual Property Organization.3 Most prominently, a
new treaty-making process to create a new global standard for intel-
lectual property enforcement has just been launched `secretly' by the
developed world led by United States, the European Commission,
Japan and Switzerland. The new treaty, the Anti-Counterfeiting
Trade Agreement, which is well-known for its fancy acronym
`ACTA', is undeniably primarily targeting the developing world.4
Tightening and increasing the requirements on intellectual prop-
erty enforcement in international intellectual property law has a
tremendous negative impact on the developing countries, which are
already striving to meet the substantive standards on intellectual
property protection required by the TRIPS Agreement. Under the
stick-and-carrot policy (trade sanctions, WTO DSB, technical assist-
ance, and so on), the developing countries are ...