BIO 2015: TTIP could ‘reinforce IP as innovation driver’
The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has the potential to reinforce intellectual property as a driver of innovation, said Washington, DC-based former lawyer Jennifer Hillman at the BIO International Convention on Tuesday.
The TTIP is a trade and investment deal being negotiated between the US and EU. It is hoped the agreement will make it easier to trade pharmaceutical products between the jurisdictions by cutting red tape.
Over the last 20 years, since the TRIPS Agreement first came into force, trade and IP have become “almost inexorably linked”, said Hillman, a former commissioner at the US International Trade Commission who now works at Georgetown University Law School.
Bilateral and multinational trade agreements would help bring the World Trade Organization’s 20-year-old rules back up to date, Hillman said.
She said that IP tends not to be treated as a form of “property” outside the US and EU and that there has been some “backsliding” in the public consciousness of the concept of IP as a driver of innovation. Completion of the TTIP would help reinforce that concept, Hillman said.
While acknowledging the differences in IP policy between the US and Europe, she said that the jurisdictions “need to make a collective statement about their firm belief in IP”.
India’s IP policy, and how it contrasts with that of the US, was also discussed during the session. In April it was announced that India was once again placed on the US Trade Representative’s priority watch List in its “Special 301 Report”.
Hillman said that India has been “pushing the boundaries” of IP restrictions.
While India’s new prime minister Narendra Modi, who was elected in May last year, “is more committed to business” and has been “saying the right things” with respect to IP, whether he will implements those aims remains to be seen, Hillman said.
The 2015 BIO International Convention is taking place in Philadelphia from June 15 to 18.
This story was first published on LSIPR.
