Pacific Alliance: An Opportunity to Establish New Priorities on the Protection of Intellectual Property in Free Trade Agreements

Abstract:
The interest of the countries to look for an international framework for the protection of Intellectual property rights started in the late XIX century. However, in the global trade field, an international standard was recently featured in 1994 with the emergence of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Agreement on Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Related to Trade (TRIPs Agreement). Later, the Intellectual property topics have been deepened under schemes of bilateral international trade agreements encouraged primarily by the United States of America, European Union and Japan, aiming to protect their industries.

Considering the importance of the Pacific Alliance and its intra-regional and global projection, emphasising the Asia Pacific region, it is a particular interest to be able to analyse the points that the bloc should bear in mind to create obligations on intellectual property matters that will attend to its interests. Although these obligations have not been established, it has gathered a working group entrusted to develop a working plan on intellectual property affairs.

For that reason, the current work will present the common ground of the intellectual property matters that the founding countries of the Pacific Alliance share. These works refer to some of the problems these countries are currently facing regarding this matter, as well as the points of interest that they could boost in the frame of the Pacific Alliance. We will also address the question of whether such issues should be discussed in the context of cooperation or if it is appropriate and necessary to articulate obligations at the international level, which allows them to address this problem and address those interests.
From our perspective, some conditions exist in the framework of the Pacific Alliance that can make favourable to adopt actions before the accession of new members to these integration processes in the following years.

Resumen:
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Authors: John Cusipuma and Gonzalo Ramírez
Full document: 2016, Cusipuma & Ramirez, Pacific Alliance- An Opportunity to Establish New Priorities on the Protection of Intellectual Property in Free Trade