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This chapter traces the chain of events and political debate surrounding the evolution of the international intellectual property (IP) architecture from the establishment of the Paris Convention in the 19th century, to reform efforts by developing countries in the 1970s, and the recent initiative in WIPO on a Development Agenda. It illustrates that tensions around striking an appropriate balance between public interests and private rights have persisted since the inception of the IP system. Furthermore, it shows that the establishment of the Paris Convention was the result of a strategic compromise between those who wanted to promote the recognition of patents beyond national boundaries, and those who feared that outright protection of foreign inventions might hamper local industrialization. Countries have continued to grapple with IP and development through the five revision conferences of the Paris Convention, waves of national reforms and attempts to rebalance the international IP system, the advent of the TRIPS Agreement, and finally the adoption of the WIPO Development Agenda.

This chapter analyzes international harmonization of intellectual property rights, tracing its history from the Paris (1883) and Berne Conventions (1886) to the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) and the TRIPS Agreement of the WTO. The contents of the TRIPS Agreement and its implementation through the WTO dispute settlement mechanism are detailed. The chapter further shows how concerns triggered by the TRIPS Agreement in developing countries over negative effects in securing public health resulted in modification of the Agreement in 2001.

This chapter explores the revisions of and special agreements to the Berne and Paris Conventions. Amongst the multilateral agreements in the international intellectual property (IP) system, these Conventions stand out as those with a long history of more than a hundred years of existence. However, international IP law has since developed outside of the two ‘classic’ conventions. Increasingly, these developments have taken place in different forums, such as trade negotiations, and in new institutions, such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO). This raises the question on how these new instruments relate to the classic treaties. As such, the chapter also analyses the WTO Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of International Property Rights (TRIPS) and its relations with the main pre-existing IP treaties.

This chapter presents European intellectual property law as a case study in private law harmonisation. It first outlines the international legal framework, which consists of international agreements such as the Paris and Berne Conventions and the TRIPS Agreement. Then it sets out some basic features of EU law in the area of intellectual property: its sources, its historical development, the EU competences in this field after the Lisbon Treaty and the impact of European intellectual property law on the law of the member states, in particular the preliminary ruling procedure as provided by Article 267 TFEU.

This chapter gives a cursory review of situations where the rules of international intellectual property (IP) law interface with those of other rule-systems in international law. Mapping these relationships is challenging, given the multitude of rules, institutions, and actors in international law. Those have increased dramatically in number since the foundations of international IP law in the form of the Berne Convention (BC) on the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and the Paris Convention on the Protection of Industrial Property. These interfaces, however, give evidence of a wider phenomenon which is commonly referred to as ‘fragmentation’ on the global level. Such fragmentation has provoked a debate in social, political, and legal science on how to perceive and describe this phenomenon and what responses (in particular in terms of ways to resolve conflicts or tensions between branches of international law) it calls for.