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Latest revision as of 15:13, 16 September 2014
Trade agreements and other international treaties sometimes contain clauses about patents.
Contents
Overview of the main organisations
- United Nations
- WIPO - a "specialised agency" of the UN
- GATT - from 1947 to 1994
- World Trade Organisation set up in 1995 to replace GATT
Useful to know exactly what's in them
Don't let others misrepresent them
These agreements are usually very vague. Vague clauses can easily be abused, allowing someone to falsely claim that the agreement requires something. For example, some people have claimed or implied that the TRIPS agreement requires software ideas to be patentable. This is not true at all. The treaty actually only has the vague requirement that innovations be patentable for all "fields of technology". Software is never mentioned there; and when software is mentioned, the treaty considers it a work of authorship (not a technology), like a book i.e. copyright not patents. (This is discussed in more detail on the TRIPS page - the point here is that it's always worth reading the exact text.)
Avoid requiring violation of the treaty
Some treaties should be ignored or abolished, but if you want to achieve the goal of ending software patents, you should look for the easiest way. Using the TRIPS example again, we can block software patents without having to also abolish or change TRIPS. Maybe TRIPS should be abolished, but that's a lot of work, and it's unnecessary for the goal of ending software patents.
You could of course still make tangental mentions of TRIPS being a catastrophe. Just don't make that big project a precondition for the much smaller project of ending software patents.
Related pages on ESP Wiki
- Category:International agreements
- Free Trade Agreements with the USA
- Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement
- March 23rd 2010 leaked complete draft: 201001 acta.pdf as text
- March 1st 2010 leaked partial draft, with EU comments: ACTA-6437-10.pdf as text
- TRIPS
- Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement
External links
Wikipedia has good articles about many of these bodies:
