This comprehensive and influential international agreement establishes minimum standards on IP rights. By providing more stringent patent protection, TRIPS will help to generate increased profits for patent holders on new technologies, which are largely with industrialized countries and multinational corporations. Industrialized countries account for over 90 per cent of global research and development and the US alone accounts for almost half of it.

WTO’s TRIPS agreement is an attempt to narrow gaps in the ways IP rights are protected around the world, by bringing them under international rules. It establishes minimum level of protection that each government has to give to the IP of fellow WTO members. This strikes a balance between the long-term benefits and possible short-term costs to the society. In the long term, the society is benefited as IP protection encourages creativity and invention and also they enter the public domain upon expiration of period of protection.

TRIPS agreement covers the following:

• Basic principles of trading system and application of international IP agreements
• Ways and means of effecting IP protection
• Means of enforcement of these IP rights by countries in their territories
• Effective and expeditious IP-related dispute settlement between WTO members
• Transitory arrangements to be made before the introduction of the new system
• Lists out categories of IP that are to be protected

Main provisions under TRIPS agreement relating to patents require the following:

• Member countries to provide product patents in all fields of technology without any exception
• Providing a minimum uniform period of 20-year protection
• Grant of compulsory license – which is an obligation by the patentee to issue license for the patent on his terms, subject to certain terms and conditions, upon order of a controller – on the basis of individual merits of the case, such as lack of availability to public at a reasonable price, etc.
• The burden of proof of a process patent that leads to production of a patented product is to be placed on the process patentee
• Availability of patent rights to products irrespective of whether they are locally produced or imported
• Providing protection to micro-organisms and micro-biological processes
• Enactment of an effective system for the protection of new plant varieties

The objectives of TRIPS are enshrined as promotion of technological innovation, and transfer and dissemination of technology to the mutual advantage of producers and users of technological knowledge in a manner conducive to the social and economic welfare and to a balance of rights and obligations.

While making it mandatory for the WTO member countries to implement TRIPS, it allows certain flexibilities enabling necessary amendments to national IP laws in accordance with the health care needs of the respective developing and least developed countries. TRIPS, in its objectives, also lays down that enforcement of IP rights should not themselves be barriers to legitimate trade.

Though the objective of TRIPS was projected as reduction of distortions and impediments to international trade, it actually succeeded in bringing about effective and adequate protection of IP rights, especially to the following categories listed out in its agreement:

• Patents
• Copyrights
• Trademarks
• Geographic indications (GI)
• Trade secrets
• Integrated circuits (ICs) layout designs
• ID