Thirty Plus One: TRIPS, Innovation, and the Political Future of Minimum IP Standards: 19th Annual International Intellectual Property Lecture

Rwy'n meddwl ein bod ni'n dechrau. Yn gyntaf, mae'n wych gweld llawer yma heno. Rhai ffosgwylion gyffredinol o ran y rhai nad ydych chi'n gwybod fi, ond fy enw i yw Doug Chalmers ac rydw i'n Gweithiwr arbennig ar gyfer y Coleg Emanuel, yr 28, i fod yn bennaf, ac rydw i'n dweud yn gyffredinol nad ydw i yn gyffredinol arbennig arbennig. Ond rydw i wedi bod i nifer o'r rhai hwn. Mae hwn yn fy un peth pennaf nawr ac mae'r casgliad annwyl hwnnw, dwi'n meddwl i mi, wedi dod yn un o ddysg eithaf agored ac edrychiolaeth eithaf anhygoel. Ac rwy'n gweld gan lawer o'r ffosgwylion gyffredinol yma, yn eu hunain, mae'n rhwydwaith ac mae'n gymuned o sgolwyr, hyfforddiant a myfyrwyr, llawer ohonyn nhw sy'n dod yn ôl bob blwyddyn i ystyried syniadau, rhannu profiad, cyfathrebu gyda'i gilydd ar y ddisgyblio, y ddisgyblio'n ymwneud yn gyflym. Felly diolch i chi i gyd am ymuno â ni heddiw wrth i ni ddod i gael cyfarfod. Brifysgol Ruth Okajae, rwy'n cael hynny'n anghywir, Okajae, o'r ysgol llyfrau Harvard. Mae'n gyfrifol iawn i ni gynhyrchu un o'r sgolwyr argyfwng ariannol anhygoel yn y byd. Rwy'n cael ymchwil ar y ddisgyblio ar y ddisgyblio, ac mae'n dweud wrth i mi fod hi'n ysgol llyfrau Jeremiah Smith yn y Sgol Llyfrgell ysgol Llyfrgell ysgol Harvard a'n co-gynhyrchwyr o'r Centre Klein Berkman am Ddisgyblio a Chymdeithas. Mae'n gwaith hi wedi sylweddoli drafodaeth cyhoeddus ar sut mae llyfrau profiad ariannol yn gysylltu â technoleg, arloesedd a datblygu economaidd, yn enwedig yng Nghymru, y Sgrin, ac ar draws y Cymru. Yn ystod ei gyrfa, mae hi wedi cynghori sefydliadau gwleidyddol, cymunedau economaidd rheolaidd a llywodraethol ar blynyddoedd sy'n rhannu o gysylltu â gwasanaethau a gwybodaeth i'r llywodraeth o technolegau digidol a gwybodaeth traddodiadol. Mae ei sgolwysiad ar y cymorth WIPO/WTO a economi gwleidyddol o wneud triniaethau IP wedi dod yn darllen allweddol i unrhyw un sy'n bwysig ar gyfer y dyfodol o normau IP cyhoeddus. A'r un sefydliad internet, yn dweud wrthym i, neu maent yn wahanol, mae'n rhaid i mi ddweud, roeddwn i wedi cael fy mhrofiad yn y math hwnnw o blynyddoedd internet, o ysbrydoli mwy a mwy gyda phosibion. Mae'n dweud wrthym i fod y cydnabydd o'r dyfodol a'i effaith o'i cyfrifiadau, roedd hi wedi cael ei gwerthu yn y Pris Barry ar gyfer gyflawni gweithredu intelegrol arbennig ym 2023, yn annog ei rôl yn datblygu fframwaith leol i ddiogelu creadigrwydd a chyflwyno llyfrau dynol. Rhaid i chi ddod i mewn i roi cyflwyniad i Ruth. Mae hi'n siarad â ni ystod y dydd heno am gwerthu intelegrol a'i rôl mewn fframwaith lleihau, gobeithio, adnodd yn gyffredinol a chyfrifiadol, nid oes bar bach. Diolch ac yn fawr i chi, Ruth. Mae hynny ar, dydw i ddim yn siŵr. A allwch chi mi glywed? Gallaf geisio prosiect, felly os nad yw hynny ar, bydd hynny'n iawn. Iawn, beth mae hynny'n iawn? Iawn, gwych. Wel, diolch yn fawr iawn am ddod yma heno. Rwyf wedi dweud i rai o fy myfyrwyr o Harvard sydd mewn gwirionedd yma yng Nghymru yn astudio, bod gennym lawer arall i'w dysgu gan y Brifysgol ac hyd yn oed rydw i'n byw yng Nghymru lle galla i fod wedi cael fy nghyffwrdd i ddweud hynny. Rwyf wedi cael fy nghyffwrdd gan y Gweinidog, ac mae'n dda iawn i mi fod wedi cael fy nghyffwrdd i'w ddweud hynny. Rwyf wedi cael fy nghyffwrdd gan y Gweinidog lle galla i fod wedi cael fy nghyffwrdd i ddweud hynny. Rwyf wedi cael fy nghyffwrdd i ddweud hynny. Diolch yn fawr iawn. Yn 1995, mae'r byd wedi newid yn sylweddol. Yn olaf, dyna beth rydyn ni'n cael ei ddweud. Yn 1 Genedlaeth, fe wnaeth yr Ymgysylltiad ar ysbytiau sy'n ymwneud â llywodraethau gwasanaethol mewn gwirionedd ar gyfer y rhan fwyaf o'r byd sy'n ei ddatblygu, ond gyda datrysiadau i fyny, fe wnaeth yr Ymgysylltiad ar ysbytiau sy'n ymwneud â llywodraethau gwasanaethol i'r rhan fwyaf sy'n ymwneud â llywodraethau gwasanaethol yn y byd. Fe wnaeth yr Ymgysylltiad ar gyfer y rhan fwyaf o'r byd sy'n ymwneud â llywodraethau gwasanaethol yn y byd sy'n ymwneud â llywodraethau gwasanaethol nawr rwy'n argymell yn ffurfiol yma oherwydd mewn gwirionedd mae'r negosiadau am y Cysylltiad y Trips yn cynnwys ei dechrau ffurfiol ac mewn gwirionedd dechreuwyd gyda ddyn iawn yn yr U.S. a oedd wedi bod yn rhan o 'r Cysylltiad Militaidd yr U.S. a dechreuodd i fyny mewn drosglwyddo iawn aeth i'r ysgol ar y Llywodraeth a dechreuodd yn y Cyfrifwr ar y Pfizer ac yna hefyd yn Gweinidog mewn rhwng yr amgylchiadau yn ei gweithredu roedd yn gweithio yn y cyffrediniaeth Kennedy ac felly oedd ganddo'r cysylltiadau hyn gyda'r Llywodraeth hefyd yn arbennig gan hyfforddiant fe wnaeth ei ffwrdd yn llythyrol yn yr hyn rydyn ni'n ei alw'n y feddwl o dim i'r cymaint o bopeth ac yn y blynyddoedd yn ôl i'r negosiadau ffurfiol o'r Cysylltiad Militaidd yn ei rôl fel CEO o Pfizer fe ddechreuodd ei sylweddoli bod y ganlyniad o'r cyfrifiad yn gwirioneddol ddim yn cynhyrchu wrth y cyfnod ond yn y farchnadau'n gyffredinol efallai y byddai'n cynhyrchu ac fel ganlyniad yn y farchnadau'n gyffredinol, mae'n rhaid i'r CEO ifanc ddechrau meddwl am ffyrdd i gynhyrchu marchnau gwahanol ac yn benodol i gael cyllid o ran y cyfrifiad o'r patentau y mae'r cwmni yn ei ddewis. Rwy'n credu ei bod yn bwysig dechrau'r lleser heno gyda'r stori oherwydd pan fyddwn yn siarad am trws a'i effaith ar y Cymru ac pan fyddwn yn siarad am bŵer y patentau a llawer o'r costau cymdeithasol cymdeithasol yr ydym yn gwybod y gall y patentau eu cynnwys yn y cymdeithas ac yn enwedig yn y cymdeithas dynol mae tendens i ddechreuodd y cyfrifiad hwnnw i golli'r bywydau gwirioneddol a'r gynhyrch a'r ddechrau ac mewn llawer o amser y cymdeithas da o'r bobl a ddechreuodd y broses sydd wedi cael ganolbwyntiau sylweddol a llawer o ganlyniadau cyffredinol yn y byd ddechreuodd y cyfrifiad trws a gafodd ei ddisgrifio gan aelodau'n arwain ar ei ddiwedd fel rhyfelwyr. mae'r Ffreswr Derry Reichman yn ei ysgrifennu'n ei ddisgrifio fel radigol ac oedd y geiriau hyn ddim ond oherwydd bod y cyfrifiad wedi cael ei gyflawni fel ffit sydd wedi gweld ei fod yn ddiddorol i'r gymuned rhyngwladol am ddiwedd oed, yn enwedig y cyfathrebu hon o reolau IP, yn enwedig gwarthegau, ond hefyd oherwydd bod y cyfathrebu TRIPS wedi bod yn ymwneud â throfi'r charakter o'r system economaidd rhyngwladol. Roedd wedi tyfu o'r syniad yr oedd un CEO o sut i sicrhau dod yn ôl i fuddsoddiadau cyfrifiadur yn farchnadau cyd-destunol i rhwydwaith ysbrydol a chyflawniol sydd wedi cael ei gyflawni gan y cymysg anodd hwnnw o bwer, unilateraeth a multilateraeth. Yn ymwneud â'r syniad o gynlluniau fel ddewis o ddynion economaidd a'i gyflawni i mewn i gynlluniau a fyddai'n cynhyrchu ystyr leol. Mae'r syniad hwnnw'n debyg iawn i fynd o system sy'n seiliedig ar bwysig i system sy'n seiliedig ar ddynion llywodraeth. Mae'r syniad hwnnw'n debyg iawn i ddynion ariannol a chyffredinwyr a llywodraethau a pholisiwyr, ond hefyd i ddyfynwyr cymdeithasol ac economwyr cymdeithasol. Roedd Profesor John Jackson yn ariannol yn y ffordd o ddynion cymdeithasol yn dweud, ac rwy'n ysgrifennu, "Fyddai hanes cymdeithasol yn cael ei ddisgrifio fel datblygiad graddol o ran ymddygiad sy'n ymwneud â phower mewn ystod y dynion llywodraethol tuag at ymddygiad sy'n ymwneud â rheolaethau sy'n ymwneud â rheolaethau sy'n ymwneud â rheolaethau. Byddai'r rhai ohonoch chi sy'n ariannol cyhoeddus yn cydnabod y paradîm hwn a'i newid yn unwaith. Mae'r llywodraeth cyhoeddus yn ystod y dynion cyhoeddus yn ystod y dynion llywodraethol wedi gweithio â'r cwestiwn hwn. Sut rydyn ni'n symud Cymdeithasau Cymdeithasol o'r dynion llywodraethol i gyfrifiad lle mae'r llywodraeth yn ei gynnal? Ond ar ddiwedd y cydlyniadau WTO yn 1995, fe wnaeth y syniad hwy o gyflawniad gan wladau pwyllgor ac yn wladau bach yn ystod y dynion llywodraethol sy'n ymwneud â rheolaethau newydd. Roedd y llywodraeth yn cael ei ystyried fel yn hanfodol i gynnal y dynion llywodraethol yn ystod y dynion llywodraethol sy'n ymwneud â rheolaethau sy'n ymwneud â rheolaethau newydd. Roedd y dynion llywodraethol yn cael ei ystyried fel yn hanfodol i gynnal y dynion llywodraethol sy'n ymwneud â rheolaethau newydd. but I want to make clear that law in this sense is not statutes. It's not court decisions, and it's not even the presence of a sovereign, although all of these features of a legal regime were very much present. Rather, law in this sense could be understood more as a constitutional status, a shift not just to order over power, but a shift to a culture and a set of expectations having more to do with what countries were moving away from, but with far less clarity about what they were moving away for. Law was the target or the goal of these new rules. It offered us a destination that was acceptable by all parties, after all, it was a destination that was acceptable by all parties. After all, who wanted to be the next person on the U.S. watch list? Who wanted to be the next object of a special 301 investigation? And who wanted to be on the receiving end of tariffs? 30 plus one years later, it turns out that in fact, we did not know what we were moving away for, and we didn't even know what we were moving away from. Let me not jump ahead. It was clear in 1995 that law was the target of these new rules. It was not clear how we would get to law. And the TRIPS agreement is a particularly useful expression of this idea of power to law, of chaos to order, of instability to permanence. And as I suggest in this lecture, the agreement imposed discipline on both developed and developing countries by giving us this minimum common standards applicable to all countries. For those of you who are intellectual property lawyers in the room, it moved us from, quote, a patchwork and territorial system of intellectual property regulation to a harmonized baseline that was substantially high. But I think it's important to give you some historical context for those who are not intellectual property lawyers in the room. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, patents and copyrights and trademarks stopped at national borders. Trademarks follow so for reasons attributable to the work of Professor Bentley here in the room, so I will not stray where angels fare to tread. But certainly patents and copyrights stopped abruptly at national borders. Many countries did not even maintain patent systems. And unless a bilateral treaty existed, creators and inventors had no right to claim their rights, and no protection abroad. In short, intellectual property was, as we all teach our students on day one, territorial. And thus, it was a matter of sovereign control. The situation imposed by territoriality became increasingly problematic during the Industrial Revolution. And as technological innovation and creative works began to circulate internationally, states realized that their citizens' intellectual creations were vulnerable to copying in foreign markets. A country might invest heavily in invention or in artistic production only to see the resulting goods reproduced cheaply elsewhere, particularly in emerging global fora. European powers in particular experienced this problem acutely. French publishers, for example, complained often the Belgian printers reproduced French books and sold them cheaply both in third countries and in the United States. And in the late 19th century, the Dutch and British publishers had to go back to France and to France itself. The United Kingdom faced similar frustrations with the United States, which during the 19th century declined to protect British copyrights as the young Republic itself sought to chart its independent path to economic development. In fact, in 1837, a group of prominent English authors, led by Harriet Martineau, petitioned the United States Congress in vain. But a petition, the United States Congress, called for a bilateral treaty with the United Kingdom to provide copyright protection for foreign authors in the United States. The United States Congress, in its commitment to develop a literary culture and to produce works in abundance that were cheaply accessible to the U.S. population, declined politely. It is unclear, historically, whether Charles Dickens joined this group. Historians have argued over this for many years, but there's no question that authors like Charles Dickens were deeply perturbed by both what they felt as the inhumane and callous treatment of authors, but also at the lack of concern for the economic well-being of the authorial class. This was a time when Charles Dickens, for example, was quickly becoming one of the chief victims of American literary piracy. Even before he had completed the Pickwick Papers, the Philadelphia publishing house of Carey, Lee, and Blanchard began selling unauthorized editions of the Pickwick Papers in the United States. And Moncref, W.T. Moncref, that is, staged an unauthorized and plagiarized dramatic version of the work in New York, from which he earned quite a lucrative windfall. All this, of course, would be illegal today. But these early conflicts revealed a sort of structural dilemma. Intellectual goods circulating across borders, but the laws that protected them did not. Now, of course, early international efforts to address this problem relied on the legal innovation of reciprocity. States agreed to protect foreign intellectual property rights only if the other state offered equivalent protection in return. And it is somewhat of the sad oddity to me that certainly I don't teach as much about reciprocity in my classrooms as I should, because as I shall suggest in this lecture, reciprocity is in fact the place that we never left. This equivalent protection was problematic. Two forms of it emerged: material reciprocity, which required that the laws of the two states mirror each other. Protection would be granted only if the forms of reciprocity were in line with the laws of the two states. One legal system provided essentially identical rights. In practice, the system proved unworkable. Courts struggled to interpret foreign law. They struggled to assess whether laws were truly reciprocal after all. What did it mean for a work to be original? What did it mean for it to be fixed in a tangible medium of expression? What was copy? A question that we are now asking in the age of artificial intelligence. Is it the deep memorization in our large language models? Is it the splitting image that gets made in our brains and our neural networks as we perceive objects? What does copying mean, and what does it mean for purposes of liability under copyright law? Courts struggled also with the idea that they were vested with the obligation to interpret foreign law and to make these decisions on grounds that were truly reciprocal. This was a real challenge. It was a real challenge. And so material reciprocity was a challenge. The second type of reciprocity, formal reciprocity, offered a softer approach. States under this system agreed to provide protection, but did not attempt to harmonize their laws. Foreign creators would simply receive the same protection as they were granted to domestic nationals. Now this sort of formal reciprocity was interesting because it acknowledged the existence of foreign creativity, creativity across markets, but it only sought to protect that creativity on the same terms as its own nationals received. In other words, the complexities of material reciprocity led states to abandon it in favor of the simpler principle of nondiscrimination. But in reality, foreigners continue to experience discrimination even under this regime of reciprocity. The records seem clear across Germany and even across Belgium, where there were discrepancies in the regulatory administration of intellectual property rights, in particular patents. Economists who have looked at this question note that local patent applicants often received preferential treatment in local administrative offices because sometimes language was a barrier for foreigners. Sometimes the technical rules about how the patent forms needed to be filed was a technical barrier. And often local agents who were a requirement under national law would often leak secrets from the patent applications to the local competitors. In other words, we moved from a season and a period in a regime of blatant discrimination to a softer, friendlier, and less obvious form of discrimination. The adoption of international minimum standards, rather than reciprocity, marked a profound shift in the architecture of the law. These earlier systems that had been grounded in reciprocity, whether material or formal, really did something that the TRIPS agreement sought to do away with. It allowed states to calibrate protection in response to the laws of their treaty partners. It allowed trade-offs between alternative regimes. International minimum standards meant that countries could identify areas in their latent economies in which they could bargain away certain levels of protection in exchange for other kinds of trade benefits. So this calibration in response to the national laws proved to be the grease, the butter, the oil that allowed the machinery of intellectual property law to work in ways that we have not seen since. While it did allow different differentiations across regimes and across national laws, it nevertheless allowed this patina of harmonization to coexist somewhat comfortably with discriminatory impulses. By contrast, minimum standards, as embodied in the TRIPS agreement, establish baseline hard obligations that all member states must meet regardless of their level of development and regardless of their domestic policy. And while this framework promotes a degree of global uniformity, it also allows the space for this kind of experimentation. Minimum standards delineate areas of convergence around which national legal systems must ally, and so it does reduce deviation, but in practical terms, these standards constrain sovereignty. The diminution of sovereignty ultimately also puts pressure on this idea of territoriality. The combined minimum standards in the TRIPS agreement limited this adaptive flexibility of domestic legal regimes, and it did so not only in the face of political pressure, but also in the face of technological change. Now the tension, this move from reciprocity to minimum standards, and the tension that it evokes was much more visible than scholars anticipated. In the first wave of disputes under the World Trade Organization, much of the litigation occurred not between developed and developing countries, but really between developed countries themselves. Countries challenged differences in each other's intellectual property laws. Regimes that had been legal under formal reciprocity became illegal under the TRIPS agreement, but the practice of states remained in effect a de facto reciprocity regime. One notable example, for example, was the copyright exceptions in the United States. One of the first challenges under the TRIPS regime was a question, a query, now allowed under the WTO, about the way in which the Fair Use Doctrine might violate the TRIPS agreement. Other challenges between the United States and Ireland, between the EU and the United States, between the EU and Canada, between the United States and Canada, all of these disputes became ways in which developed countries began to fight each other over the standards that they themselves had negotiated. These disputes illustrated how minimum standards could translate and transform domestic policy choices. The EU-Canada and U.S.-Canada dispute about Canada's exception in its national laws allowing for stockpiling of pharmaceutical products is a classic example. Canada, in its effort to ensure that drug prices were accessible for Canadian citizens, allowed for a period of time patented drugs to be made, manufactured, and stockpiled until the day of the patent expiration. This would mean that immediately upon patent expiration, drugs would be available, pharmaceutical products would be available within the Canadian markets at the marginal price. The WTO dispute panel upheld the complaints of the United States and the EU, saying that stockpiling eradicated the lead time the patent owners were de facto and entitled to under-patent legal regimes. Thankfully, the administrative and the regulatory process exception that Canada had, a process exception that allowed generic firms to, in essence, seek approval for their manufacturing and to ensure regulatory compliance, survived the WTO dispute. Many of you are familiar with these disputes, and so you can see the ways in which the shift from reciprocity to minimum standards was not a shift about power, nor was it even a shift about law. It was instead a shift that proved to be important for the exercise of institutional and normative change within the global intellectual poverty complex. It's interesting that the challenge for example to the Fair Use Doctrine, which was one of the first decisions that the United States made in the 1980s, I would say, not precisely decided, survived and caused the survival of the Fair Use Doctrine, and became the very doctrine that today is playing a central role in the development of artificial intelligence technologies. Had the critique and the attack on the U.S. Fair Use Doctrine survived, the training of large-large these models whether you love them or hate them, would be much harder today to do in any country of the world, because much of that training on copyrighted works rests on this question of flexibilities and exceptions that exist in national law. The flexibility of the U.S. Fair Use Doctrine has enabled large-scale text and data mining practices, all of the copying that underpin modern AI training. Whether fair use will survive the many challenges that have been logged against it, the flexibility of the U.S. Whether fair use will survive the many challenges that have been logged against it, critical, hidden consequence of minimum standards has of course now become exposed as the raw nerve of the contemporary fight over artificial intelligence. It is of course important to keep in mind that the task of creating a universal intellectual popping system was one that was anticipated as a social good, and in fact, as a public good. But it was difficult to do this in the face of clear nationalist impulses about the safety, the integrity, and the cultural consequences of adopting technologies created in other countries within one's own country. So international minimum standards, in many ways, was supposed to represent a compromise. Rather than harmonizing laws completely, it was meant to retain a minimum level of discretion and a vast amount of harmonization. This pragmatic bridge between divergent legal systems has, of course, now become the mechanism through which national laws aim to converge. And the instrument of that convergence is, of course, exactly what technical assistance was created for. Now, it's important to remind all of us, and this was something in preparing for this lecture that I had to remind myself, that states were anticipating a renewed and ongoing process of harmonization. Right from the time of 1883 and 1886, the idea was never that we would settle these standards at the existing levels. Mechanisms for renewed coordination across national borders was meant to produce a dynamic framework for the development of the international law. A dynamic framework to expand international obligations with respect to intellectual property. But this, of course, was not feasible. Even in the 20th century, between 1965 and 1985, a fundamental tension emerged. Industrialized countries wanted these high standards. Developing poorer countries wanted weaker protection for the exact same reasons that the U.S. and other developed countries had wanted them at the turn of the 19th century. But it became clear, and I realize now that I never did slides, but okay, but it became clear as scholars began to examine and to explore what intellectual property was meant to accomplish nationally, that states could only accelerate technological learning by reducing dependence on imported goods. Because if the goods could not be copied, if the patented technologies could not be reverse-engineered, then the learning capacity of importing countries was limited in the first instance. It became better, argued economists and scholars, not to allow this dependence to ever emerge in the first place. In the late 1960s, India became the first example of this. For many years, it declined, and I'm just going to stick very quickly here to this slide. For many years, India, as is well known, declined to grant pharmaceutical product patents, enabling domestic firms to reverse-engineer foreign medicines, and, of course, India built a thriving generic drug industry. From the perspective of developing countries, such policies were tools of economic development, and India, in fact, is a model. As you can see on the slide, in the 21st century, despite the TRIPS agreement, the architecture of discrimination worked such that foreign share of pharmaceutical protection decreased to 40 percent in 2000, and by 2010 to 23 percent, and it has continued to go down, so much so that today, the singular signal of economic independence in India has become efforts by foreign multinationals to purchase domestic Indian pharmaceutical firms. The total market value of the Indian pharmaceutical industry is expected to reach $130 billion by 2030. Robert R. Reilly: But, of course, it's important to remember that all of this then requires access to global markets, and you see that the way that this was done in Brazil was to very explicitly resurrect institutional levers in addition to severe independence in its national laws. In other words, each country in the aftermath of the WTO and before the WTO continued to effectively practice reciprocity. Each of these countries, despite the firm commitments under the TRIPS agreement, nevertheless, asserted institutional, regulatory, and normative rules to bypass the obligations of minimum standards. Robert R. Reilly: My argument tonight, is that minimum standards simply repackaged, reformulated, and then reasserted reciprocity as the governing mechanism for intellectual property. Robert R. Reilly: One of the things that has resulted from this is that by linking those standards to a dispute settlement system and making them enforceable through trade sanctions, these soft obligations that became hard but remained under a reciprocal framework made it harder for political trade-offs to grease the system. And so some key lessons begin to emerge from this picture. The so-called decisive and radical transformation has turned out to be a transformation none wanted and that many did not anticipate. Robert R. Reilly: Few expected that these minimum standards would incentivize the exercise of power and exit from multilateral regimes. The WTO dispute settlement body has been as a standstill. Why? Because the United States lost enough cases, felt that U.S. interests were not adequately supported at the WTO stage, and so had very little choice but to exit. Robert R. Reilly: But this exit, while the U.S. has been criticized for it, is not just the United States. Brazil, India, China, the EU, all across the member states of the WTO, exits both implicit and explicit from multilateral regimes have been occurring. Why? Because as trade scholars famously argued, Because as trade scholars famously argued, in particular, Professor Joost Poelen argued in a very important article that it is important to have more power, not less, within these multilateral regimes. Why? Because power allows tradeoffs to occur within the complex of the international regime to keep members at least engaged multilaterally. In the absence of power and strong minimum rules, states who feel strongly that their policy discretion has been compromised will simply exit the system. And that is what we have seen. A second key lesson is that minimum standards outsource technology-related public welfare problems into other legal regimes. My students often ask me, what exactly did the TRIPS accomplish at the end of the class? When I show them all of the disputes that have never been enforced, all of the compromises that have been made that have weakened domestic regulatory power, and yet still exit occurring across the member states, they ask, well, Professor, what then did the TRIPS agreement establish? My answer is at least two things. The work of important trade economists, in particular legal scholars who study international law, and the case studies that have occurred across the Global South, suggest a number of important consequences, but unanticipated in the TRIPS agreement. One, the number of intellectual property lawyers has proliferated across the Global South. This is a reason to sigh. My students will get jobs, I am guaranteed. And the bureaucracies for intellectual property lawyers continue. But these are intellectual property lawyers who now represent multinational firms in the Global South. And just as our young engineer went into government, came out, and became the CEO of Pfizer, many of our young IP lawyers represent not the public welfare, social welfare dimensions of the global intellectual property system, but rather, they represent the push to extract rent from these countries, and to continue the cycle of rent extraction. We know, for example, that within the Indian government, an entirely new legal office was established, staffed with the best Indian lawyers, intellectual property and international trade, trained principally to defend India's interests, but in defending Indian interests, they have become experts in the intellectual property system and have learned the importance and the economic attraction of having a robust and institutionally resilient system that can come face to face with the systems of the developed countries. Second, in the aftermath of the TRIPS agreement, we have seen China rise to become the world's leading patent processing agency. Many celebrated this because it was unexpected, certainly 30 years ago, that the side effect and consequence of minimum standards and harmonization would be the rise of a major power from the South, whose knowledge and whose multiplication of IP lawyers and IP expertise now rivals those of the so-called majority world. A minority world. And a third, but super important, consequence is that the TRIPS agreement has made it difficult to think about intellectual property law as a locus for the advancement of the innovation frontier. The result, of course, is that at the national level, countries are exercising unilateral choices about how to shape the regulatory and legal environment for so-called frontier technologies. Many of these technologies are going to be protected under intellectual property rights, but the regulation of them are happening outside of the intellectual property system. Of course, the Executive Order 14179 is the first of its kind. And it's the first of its kind. The Executive Order 14179 is often used as kind of the clearest example of this. But as I was arriving in the UK two days ago, I read in one of the papers how the European Union trade, a senior trade official, was talking about how to keep artificial intelligence development within the EU and how to make sure that there was effective innovation happening that could compete with the United States. In other words, we are seeing the return to a pre-trips reciprocal system. And as I conclude, I mentioned earlier that the same doctrine that once raised questions under international intellectual property law has become central to this return to national regulations and national protection. It is, in fact, the possibility of limitations and exceptions. But I think one important conclusion of our 30 plus 1 years of TRIPS is that not only have international minimum standards failed to catalyze innovation, even as they have become the critical foundations of globalized IP norms. Instead, what we have seen is the reemergence of power. The global intellectual property system reflects a gradual accumulation of legal and political power. Not globally, but nationally. India, South Africa, China, Nigeria, Kenya, countries that were emerging out of an era of globalization. India, South Africa, China, Nigeria, countries that were emerging out of an era of globalization. But I think one important conclusion of our 30 plus 1 years of TRIPS is that not only have international minimum standards failed to catalyze innovation, even as they have failed to catalyze innovation, even as they have failed to catalyze innovation, even as they have failed to catalyze innovation, even as they have failed to catalyze innovation, but they have also become the leading agitators for the exercise of power regionally. It's important to keep in mind the power that is exercised not through politics, but through law, then becomes mobilized in moments of political opportunity, such as we have today. The creation of TRIPS was one moment. The creation and the regulation of new frontier technologies is yet another moment. The emergence of these technologies continue to test the adaptability of legal frameworks built in earlier eras, but the paradox, I'm afraid, remains. Even if technologies have continued to advance outside of the IKEE system, countries in the world remain fairly poor. And while World Bank data suggests that the rates of poverty have dropped in the last 40 to 50 years, there is a static line, a static through line, that suggests that access to technology remains costly. The evolution of international intellectual property law is not simply a story about treaties and trade negotiations. It is a story about how legal structures, how legal tools, how legal tools, how legal tools, like minimum standards, accumulate a sense of power over time, but also how it dilutes multilateral power to devolve it once again to national states. Like all stories, the stories of the TRIPS agreement is unfinished. We do not know from which policy flexibility today new technologies will emerge. We have learned from TRIPS that more like-mindedness does not eradicate different difference. The US and the EU were the first litigants to use the WTO system really well. Cooperation is not conflict-free. We've also learned that minimum standards are merely formal shells. The substantive application of them require local institutions, and those local institutions are just as hungry for power as the multilateral ones. And last. We're still losing innovation. One of the key justifications for the intellectual property aggrandizement that occurred at TRIPS was the loss of innovation globally. The Swiss cheese model that needed to be plugged up so that there could be rent extraction in global markets. But in reality, indigenous people are losing their traditional knowledge. Indigenous people are losing their genetic resources. We continue to see innovation. Innovation occurring in the artificial intelligence space with uncompensated labor and with uncompensated abuse of the copyright system. And perhaps the most startling lesson of all, this radical revolutionary TRIPS agreement has brought us back to an age of unilateralism, not only in our doctrines and not only in our institutions, but what we have. We are a shell of multilateralism, what I call unilateral multilateralism. We are now back to a stage in which intellectual property must borrow significantly from international law. What is the status of the sovereign? Who is the sovereign? And how do we shape the new intellectual property frontier? Because one thing is clear from 30+1 years of TRIPS. It will not be on minimum standards. Thank you so much.