The global intellectual property (IP) regime is currently in the midst of a paradigm shift in favour of greater flexibility in IP standard-setting. Until the early 2000s, the prevailing discourse promoted the international harmonization of IP rights, modeled on high US standards of protection. A decade later, the continuous extension of IP protection through multilateral negotiations has ended. Current IP debates focus on issues such as patients’ access to medicines, internet users’ access to information, farmers’ access to seeds, programmers’ access to source codes, visually impaired people’s access to copyrighted works, and students’ access to publically-funded scientific articles.
This paper builds primarily on quantitative evidence to assess and explain this paradigm shift. It looks at changes both in inter-state politics and in transnational networks. At the inter-state level, it appears that international institutions increasingly limit the ability of the US government to aggressively push for the traditional paradigm while enabling some emerging countries to promote the alternative paradigm. At the transnational level, new networks comprised of NGOs, academics and international civil servants broke the policy monopoly of IP practitioners and actively support emerging countries by providing them with information, legitimacy and credibility.
That said, this paper also identifies two significant limits in the current paradigm shift. First, our quantitative results suggest that the US is still able to exercise substantial influence over several developing countries, especially among low income countries. Second, the emerging transnational network in favor of weaker IP regime still remains marginal in several developing countries, leaving leeway to the transnational network on IP practitioners. Paradoxically, the transnational network advocating for the new paradigm is geographically centered in the US, where the government strongly pushes for the traditional paradigm.
