Minutes - TRIPS Council - View details of the intervention/statement

United States of America
A.ii Notifications relating to Articles 3, 4 and 5
11. The representative of the United States recalled that the obligations under the TRIPS provisions in question had become applicable for all WTO Members as of 1 January 1996. As indicated by the Chairman, no Member had notified laws relating specifically to compliance with these provisions despite the fact that there was an outstanding obligation pursuant to Article 63.2 to provide the text of corresponding national implementing legislation to the Council for TRIPS. His delegation had complied with this notification obligation through its notification of main dedicated laws and regulations. He recognized that many Members were not in a position to notify all their laws and regulations, including developing country Members. He also noted that the obligations under the MFN and national treatment provisions of the TRIPS Agreement were of a nature that did not easily lend themselves to specific legislative or regulatory language. For this reason, he proposed that the Council for TRIPS take a decision that made it clear that a Member might satisfy its obligations to notify its national laws and regulations relevant to the MFN and national treatment provisions of the TRIPS Agreement by making a notification that took a standard form. This form would consist of a general statement that the Member's laws and regulations did not make distinctions as to the protection of intellectual property between its nationals and the nationals of other WTO Members and that it extended unconditionally to nationals from all WTO Members any advantage, favour, privilege or immunity that was granted to nationals from any other country. The second element of this general notification would comprise those laws and regulations of the Member not notified independently to the Council for TRIPS that failed to provide national treatment or most-favoured-nation treatment. Such an approach would be a sensible one to follow and would not require the notification of texts of laws and regulations prior to the date that a Member implemented the TRIPS Agreement in full.1
IP/C/M/8

1 A written proposal concerning this matter was received from the United States after the meeting and has been distributed as document IP/C/W/31.