Antony Taubman Honorary Professor Inaugural Lecture
When: Monday, May 12, 2025, 9:29 AM - 9:29 AM
Where: Center for Commercial Law Studies, 67 - 69 Lincoln's Inn Fields London WC2A 3JB
Speaker: Antony Taubman
Introduced by Duncan Matthews, Professor of Intellectual Property Law and Director of Research, Centre for Commercial Law Studies
About our speaker:
Antony Taubman has served as Director of the Intellectual Property, Government Procurement and Competition Division of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and as Director of the Traditional Knowledge Division of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO); he earlier worked as an Australian diplomat, as a patent attorney, and as an academic.
About the lecture:
Pacta erant servanda? Treaties, transactions and trade-relatedness at a critical time for international IP
This lecture will reflect on the continuing significance of the multilateral treaties underpinning the very conception of an international system of intellectual property law, and will consider the possible consequences of current centrifugal forces potentially undermining their centrality, their authority and their binding quality.
Treaties – and the presumption they will have binding effect – are central to the very conception of an international IP system. The venerable Paris and Berne Conventions were established as essential elements of the international legal framework during an earlier era of economic globalisation and industrialisation. They remain as central pillars of the of the system today, a century and a half later: indeed, they are effectively or implicitly relied upon innumerable times daily in the practice of IP law. In more recent years, the WTO TRIPS Agreement was an unprecedented strengthening of centripetal multilateral normsetting, a highwater mark of binding and seemingly enforceable multilateral intrusion into domestic legal and regulatory systems. The frameshift incorporating rigorous IP standards into the multilateral trade dispute mechanism was seen by its proponents and its critics alike as giving teeth to international IP law. The very call for the binding effect of TRIPS to be suspended as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic amidst concerns that it curbed developing countries' effective agency was, in a way, a backhanded acknowledgement of its apparent coercive effect. Most recently, in 2024, WIPO concluded two landmark multilateral treaties, breaking new ground in the recognition of the interests of Indigenous peoples and local communities.
Yet current centripetal trends, geopolitical tensions and trade disruption potentially cast doubt on the centrality and effective legal authority of multilateral IP system. Bilateral transactions have become a more significant source of new international norms. A reversion to transactionalism and the exertion of bilateral economic and political pressure is already apparent in the current geopolitical climate. The expectation that the TRIPS Agreement and its incorporation into the architecture of multilateral trade law was that a rules-based system would provide greater balance, fairness and predictability compared with transactional resolution of bilateral differences. Yet the enforceability of TRIPS obligations now remains moot, as the rules-based system of multilateral trade law confronts multiple challenges. Increasing linkages between national security interests and the intellectual property system, already played out in multilateral dispute settlement, exert further pressure on the system, opening up significant lacunae in enforceable obligations. Meanwhile, an emergent lex mercatoria digitalis - a kind of transnational commercial law applied as conditions of access to international digital platforms trading in IP content - is effectively governing a vast swathe of cross-border IP transactions, sidelining the formal treaty system despite attempts to retool it for the digital age.
Do these developments represent a fundamental, even foundational threat, to the idea of the international IP law? Can they be analysed together in the form of a general centrifugal trend and as steps towards fragmentation of a largely coherent legal system ? If so, should these developments concern us? And what are the consequences for the "social and economic welfare" that the TRIPS Agreement purportedly offers as an objective of the IP system?