International negotiation strategies for national patent law reform

Abstract

Since the global economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, the process of globalization has dramatically sped up. Various international conventions have sprung up and the United States (the U.S.) and Europe have begun to propagate international norms to promote their own economic interests. The concept of intellectual property rights is one of these. In particular, the U.S. has begun to demand that developing countries amend their patent laws to meet the U.S. standards, and has tried to prevent developing countries from stealing related technologies in order to protect the pharmaceutical and high-tech industries that generate high value. In this process, the U.S. started bargaining with target countries to enforce its own patent law standards bilaterally with retaliatory trade sanctions that could greatly influence the behaviour of these target countries. However, the efforts of the U.S. in this bilateral approach resulted mostly in documentation being amended. In response, the U.S. turned around and tried to harmonize the patent law using international institutions such as the World Trade Organization in a kind of multilateral approach. In contrast to the U.S.’s intentions, however, India has revised its patent law in a way that will benefit India’s generic drugs industry, taking advantage of the flexibility permitted by the WTO’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). This has significantly contributed to the role of civil society, NGOs, transnational coalitions and public images created by supporters. Therefore, it is necessary to recognize that the traditional logic of power using material resources in international trade negotiations is no longer effective for producing the desired outcome, and to recognize that third-party players other than the parties’ states can play a greater role, and we should consider this in bargaining strategies.