The International Relations of Intellectual Property

Abstract

Intellectual Property is not a term with a standard meaning. Traditionally it was used to describe the copyright protection of authors and to distinguish this from industrial property, i.e., Patents for inventions, industrial design rights, plant variety rights, trade marks and the like. Recently it has become an umbrella for copyright, rights related to it and the various forms of industrial property. The new generic grouping has been needed for a world where demand for these rights has risen to an altogether new pitch. In part this is the consequence of extraordinary advances in technologies which make recorded information easily and precisely reproducible; and partly it supports the quest of advanced economies to conserve superior knowledge as a weapon in international trade.