How TRIPs Protects Intellectual Property Rights Globally

Every time you buy a branded medicine, stream a song, or trust a logo on a product, you are interacting with intellectual property. But what happens when an idea created in one country needs protection across borders? That is the gap the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) was built to close. Negotiated as part of the deal that created the World Trade Organization, TRIPs set the first truly global rulebook for how patents, copyrights, and trademarks are protected and enforced. For a country like ours, with a massive generic medicine industry and a fast-growing creative economy, understanding TRIPs is not just academic. It shapes the price of life-saving drugs, the strength of homegrown innovation, and the terms on which we trade knowledge with the world.

What is the TRIPs agreement 🔗

TRIPs came into effect on 1 January 1995 as Annex 1C of the Marrakesh Agreement that established the WTO. It is described by the WTO as the most comprehensive multilateral agreement on intellectual property in existence. Before TRIPs, intellectual property laws varied wildly from one nation to another, and there was no single forum to settle disputes when rights were violated across borders. TRIPs changed that by binding every WTO member to a common set of minimum standards.

The agreement does not create a single global patent or a worldwide copyright office. Instead, it requires each member country to write national laws that meet an agreed floor of protection. According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, TRIPs sets minimum standards for seven categories of intellectual property: copyrights and related rights, trademarks, geographical indications, industrial designs, patents, layout designs of integrated circuits, and undisclosed information or trade secrets.

Patents, copyrights, and trademarks explained 🔗

The three forms of intellectual property that students encounter most often are patents, copyrights, and trademarks, and each protects something different.

Patents protect inventions, whether a new medicine, a machine, or a manufacturing process. TRIPs requires that patents be available for inventions in all fields of technology and that protection last for a minimum of 20 years from the filing date. Copyrights protect creative and literary works such as books, films, music, and software, and TRIPs builds on the older Berne Convention for these rights. Trademarks protect the signs, names, and logos that distinguish one company’s goods or services from another’s. Because TRIPs absorbs the substantive rules of the earlier Paris and Berne Conventions and then adds enforcement obligations, it is often called a “Berne and Paris-plus” agreement.

What made TRIPs genuinely new was its insistence on enforcement. Earlier treaties told countries what rights to grant but said little about making those rights real. TRIPs requires members to provide civil court procedures, border measures to stop counterfeit imports, and in serious cases of piracy and counterfeiting, criminal penalties.

Key principles of TRIPs 🔗

Two core principles, borrowed from the wider WTO trading system, run through the entire agreement. Both are about non-discrimination, and both are explained on the WTO’s TRIPs fact sheet.

National treatment 🔗

The principle of national treatment means a country must give foreign rights-holders the same protection it gives its own citizens. If an Indian inventor enjoys 20 years of patent protection, a German or Japanese inventor filing in our country must receive the same. This stops governments from quietly favouring domestic firms while leaving foreign creators exposed, and it gives innovators the confidence to take their ideas into new markets.

Most favoured nation 🔗

The most favoured nation (MFN) principle goes a step further. It says any advantage a country grants to nationals of one member must immediately be extended to nationals of all other members. There can be no special deals reserved for a favoured trading partner. Together, national treatment and MFN create a level field where intellectual property is protected on equal terms regardless of nationality. This consistency is exactly what businesses need when deciding whether to invest, license technology, or sell across borders.

The controversies of patent protection 🔗

For all its talk of balance, TRIPs has been one of the most contested agreements in global trade, and the sharpest fights have been over medicines. The problem is structural. A 20-year patent lets a company charge high prices without competition, which rewards research but can place essential drugs out of reach for patients in poorer countries.

Our own history makes this vivid. The Patents Act of 1970 deliberately allowed only process patents for medicines, not product patents. This meant Indian firms could legally make a patented drug as long as they used a different manufacturing process, and it is the single biggest reason the domestic generic industry grew into a global powerhouse. When we joined the WTO, however, TRIPs required us to recognise product patents too. After a transition period, the law was amended in 2005 to become TRIPs-compliant, introducing product patents for pharmaceuticals for the first time.

The Novartis case and Section 3(d) 🔗

To protect public health while complying with TRIPs, the 2005 amendment added Section 3(d), often called the anti-evergreening rule. Evergreening is the practice of making a trivial change to an existing drug and claiming a fresh 20-year patent on it, thereby blocking cheaper generics for longer. Section 3(d) denies patents to new forms of known substances unless they show a genuine improvement in therapeutic efficacy.

This provision was tested in the landmark Novartis v. Union of India case. Novartis sought a patent on a modified version of its cancer drug Glivec, and in 2013 the Supreme Court refused it under Section 3(d), holding that the new form did not demonstrate enhanced therapeutic benefit. As reported in coverage of the dispute, the ruling enabled generic competition that cut the monthly cost from roughly Rs 1.2 lakh to about Rs 8,000. Health activists welcomed it as a victory for affordable treatment, while the pharmaceutical industry argued it discouraged innovation.

The technology transfer gap 🔗

The second long-running controversy concerns technology transfer. Developing nations accepted strong patent rules partly on the understanding that developed countries would help share know-how and modern technology. In practice, many argue this promise has been weakly delivered. Stronger patents can actually make it harder and costlier for firms in poorer countries to access and build on advanced technology, widening rather than narrowing the innovation gap.

The flexibilities built into TRIPs 🔗

Critically, TRIPs is not a rigid instrument. It contains safeguards, known as flexibilities, that let governments protect public interest. These were reaffirmed in the Doha Declaration on the TRIPs Agreement and Public Health of 2001, which firmly stated that the agreement does not and should not prevent members from taking measures to protect public health.

Compulsory licensing 🔗

The best-known flexibility is compulsory licensing. Under Article 31 of TRIPs, a government can authorise a third party to produce a patented product without the patent holder’s consent, usually in return for a reasonable royalty. The Doha Declaration importantly clarified that this is not limited to emergencies and that each country may decide the grounds for granting such a licence.

Our country put this into practice in Bayer Corporation v. Natco Pharma, granting its first compulsory licence for the cancer drug Nexavar. The price reportedly fell from around Rs 2.8 lakh to roughly Rs 8,800 per month, while the patent holder still received a royalty. The case showed compulsory licensing working as a targeted tool to address affordability rather than a blanket seizure of rights.

Exemptions for least developed countries 🔗

TRIPs also recognises that the poorest nations need more time to build the institutions that intellectual property protection demands. Least developed countries (LDCs) have been granted extended transition periods, and for pharmaceutical products the WTO has extended this exemption to 1 January 2033. During this window, LDCs are not obliged to grant or enforce patents on medicines, a concession meant to keep essential treatments accessible while their economies develop. The WHO has documented how these flexibilities, alongside compulsory licensing, have been used by dozens of countries to secure lower-priced generic medicines.

Seen together, these flexibilities reveal the real character of TRIPs. It is an attempt to hold two competing goals in tension: rewarding the innovators who develop new ideas, and ensuring that the resulting knowledge does not become a barrier to health and development. How well that balance is struck depends heavily on how each member country writes and uses its own laws, which is precisely why our patent regime continues to be watched, debated, and challenged around the world.

What do you think? Does a 20-year patent strike the right balance between rewarding inventors and keeping essential medicines affordable for everyone? And should developing nations push for even stronger flexibilities within TRIPs, or does that risk discouraging the research that produces new cures in the first place?

References

1. https://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/27-trips_01_e.htm
2. https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/intel2_e.htm
3. https://www.uspto.gov/ip-policy/patent-policy/trade-related-aspects-ip-rights
4. https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/tripsfacsheet_e.htm
5. https://m.thewire.in/article/health/ustr-report-flags-indias-drug-patent-rules
6. https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/healthdeclexpln_e.htm
7. https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/ta_docssec3_e.htm
8. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/trips-intellectual-property-rights-and-access-to-medicines