Intellectual property rights in transition

The historical context and recent developments in Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), the current situation, and the way that IPR may evolve in the future are explored. This is set against a backcloth of the wide range of existing international treaties, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) in Uruguay, the establishment of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the moves towards globalisation of economies, and the ramifications of the implementation of TRIPs. A number of challenging scenarios are presented. Recent filing levels, both from home inventors and from abroad, for USPTO, EPO and JPO, are compared and contrasted, for all technologies and for specific "high technology" areas, such as genetic engineering and communications technology. The views on the global scene, in part from the perspective of a developing country in Asia, are also supplemented with some data on patenting levels in India - which remain low in relation to the levels of innovation present in the country and the size of the population. The article is interlaced with a number of case studies, legal rulings or controversies, such as the issue of the exhaustion of rights, and aspects of biotechnology and bioprospecting.