The exclusive rights to be conferred by a product patent are those of manufacture, use, offer for sale, sale and import for these purposes. Process patent protection must grant rights not only to the use of the process, but also to products obtained directly by the process. Patent holders also have the right to assign the patent or transfer it by succession and to conclude licensing agreements (Article 28). A 2003 agreement eased the requirements of the domestic market and allows developing countries to export to other countries where there is a national health problem as long as the exported medicines are not part of a trade or industrial policy. [10] Drugs exported under such a regime may be packaged or coloured differently to prevent them from harming the markets of industrialized countries. While the WTO agreements entered into force on 1 January 1995, the TRIPS Agreement granted certain transitional periods to WTO members before being required to apply all its provisions. Members of industrialized countries have been given one year to ensure that their laws and practices are in line with the TRIPS Agreement. Developing countries and countries with economies in transition (under certain conditions) were granted a period of five years, until the year 2000. The least developed countries were initially 11 years old, until 2006, and generally until 1 July 2021. The TRIPS Agreement introduced intellectual property rights into the multilateral trading system for the first time and remains the most comprehensive multilateral agreement on intellectual property to date. In 2001, developing countries, concerned about the industrialized countries` insistence on an overly narrow interpretation of TRIPS, launched a round table that resulted in the Doha Declaration. The Doha Declaration is a WTO declaration that clarifies the scope of TRIPS and, for example, states that TRIPS can and should be interpreted with the aim of “promoting access to medicines for all”. The obligations under Articles 3 and 4 shall not apply to procedures under multilateral agreements concluded under the auspices of WIPO concerning the acquisition or maintenance of intellectual property rights.
Article 40 of the TRIPS Agreement provides that certain licensing practices or conditions related to intellectual property rights that limit competition may have an adverse effect on trade and impede the transfer and dissemination of technology (paragraph 1). . . .
