Intellectual property law in Southeast Asia under microscope

Apr 04, 2007

Tensions generated by the rapid development of intellectual property law and the various interests that define its further role in the economic and legal development processes of Southeast Asian countries was the focus of the latest presentation in UOW’s Professorial Lecture Series.

Professor Christoph Antons, Director of the Centre for Comparative Law and Development Studies in Asia and the Pacific, Faculty of Law, gave the presentation today (April 4). His presentation was entitled: "The diffusion of intellectual property law in Southeast Asia: an institutional analysis".

Professor Antons told his lunchtime audience that Southeast Asian developing countries have long had a reputation for copyright piracy and the unauthorised use of trade marks and other forms of intellectual property.

From the 1980s onwards, industrialised countries began to exert pressure on these countries to adopt higher standards of legislative protection and to revise their outdated laws, which often dated back to the colonial period, he said.

Professor Antons said such pressure was initially exerted on a bilateral basis, in particular by the US, which used section 301 of the US Trade and Tariff Act of 1984 to draw up "priority watch lists" of the worst violating countries and to threaten them with trade sanctions.

He said that as a consequence, the then members of ASEAN revised or newly-introduced intellectual property legislation within a very short time frame. IP reform took on a more institutionalised form from 1994, when the Agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights, commonly known as the TRIPS Agreement, became an integral part of the World Trade Organisation Agreement.

New members of ASEAN, some of them belonging to the group of 'least developed countries', are also now in the process of enacting or drafting intellectual property laws, Professor Antons said.

Professor Antons told those attending the lecture that with legislative reform fairly advanced, the attention is shifting back to the institutional framework for intellectual property protection.

This concerns both the legal framework in general as well as institutions such as courts, the legal profession, intellectual property administering institutions and enforcement agencies, he said.

Professor Antons highlighted that in many countries, the general infrastructure in this regard has not been able to keep up with the rapidly-evolving interest in intellectual property.

Some countries have, therefore, attempted to isolate the intellectual property system from other parts of the legal and administrative structure and to increase specialisation.