摘要：The world standards for patents and copyrights established by the Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) have been controversial from their inception.This article establishes parallels between cooperative increases in the duration of intellectu-al property protection and cooperative reductions in tariff protection. Whereas a country'stariffs lead to unintended harm to other countries, its intellectual property protection gener-ates unintended benefits. The long-established GATT principle of trade liberalization hastraditionally achieved mutual gains for countries of all types through symmetric tariff ratecuts that result in different final rates. By contrast, the TRIPS agreement created the likeli-hood of losses for developing countries by requiring asymmetric increases in patents andcopyrights to establish common worldwide standards. The technical annex to this paper for-malizes the analysis with a simple model of "North-South" patent protection. Sample cal-culations suggest a decline in the net benefits from innovation in developing countries in theorder of 40 percent.
关键词：copyrights; innovation; intellectual property; patents; trade-related intellectual;property rights
