The Agreement on trade aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS) was negotiated between 1986 and 1994 as part of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which led to the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The TRIPS Agreement establishes minimum levels for different types of intellectual property (IP) protection, including copyright, trademarks, patents, industrial design and trade secret protection. Accession to the WTO implies the obligation to respect the TRIPS Agreement. According to the WTO, the agreement attempts to strike a balance between long-term social benefits to society by increasing innovation and short-term costs to society due to lack of access to inventions (World Trade Organization: protection and enforcement). From the WTO Agreement: the Agreements: wto.org/english/thewto_e/whatis_e/tif_e/agrm7_e.htm). The TRIPS Agreement is an agreement on minimum standards that allows members to guarantee, if they so wish, broader protection of intellectual property. Members are free to determine the appropriate method for implementing the provisions of the Agreement in their own legal and practical order. The TRIPS Agreement introduced intellectual property rights into the multilateral trading system for the first time and remains the most comprehensive multilateral agreement on intellectual property to date. In 2001, developing countries, concerned about the industrialized countries` insistence on an overly narrow interpretation of TRIPS, launched a round table that resulted in the Doha Declaration. The Doha Declaration is a WTO declaration that clarifies the scope of TRIPS and, for example, states that TRIPS can and should be interpreted with the aim of “promoting access to medicines for all”. This contribution considers this balance by considering the two poles of intellectual property policy: encouraging innovation and optimizing access to invention, both for consumer use and for experiments likely to increase innovation. This contribution also examines the notion of calibration, the idea that each country or region should adapt its regulatory framework to reflect its own strengths and weaknesses in optimizing what might be called its innovation policy. .
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