Article 26.2 allows Members to grant limited exemptions to industrial design protection, provided that such derogations do not unduly conflict with the normal exploitation of protected industrial designs and do not unduly affect the legitimate interests of the owner of the protected design, taking into account the legitimate interests of third parties. The 2002 Doha Declaration reaffirmed that the TRIPS Agreement should not prevent members from taking the necessary measures to protect public health. Despite this recognition, less developed countries have argued that flexible TRIPS provisions, such as compulsory licensing, are almost impossible to enforce. Less developed countries, in particular, cited their young domestic manufacturing and technology industries as evidence of the imprecision of the policy. TRIPS was negotiated in the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) from 1986 to 1994. Its inclusion was the culmination of an intensive lobbying program by the United States, supported by the European Union, Japan and other developed countries. Unilateral economic support campaigns under the Generalized System of Preferences and coercion under Section 301 of the Trade Act have played an important role in suppressing competing political positions favoured by developing countries such as Brazil, but also Thailand, India and the Caribbean Basin countries. The U.S. strategy to link trade policy to intellectual property standards can in turn be attributed to the entrepreneurial spirit of Pfizer`s management in the early 1980s, which mobilized companies in the United States and made the maximization of intellectual property privileges the top priority of U.S. trade policy (Braithwaite and Drahos, 2000, Chapter 7). In addition to the basic intellectual property standards established by the TRIPS Agreement, many nations have engaged in bilateral agreements to introduce a higher level of protection.
This collection of standards, known as TRIPS+ or TRIPS-Plus, can take many forms. [20] The general objectives of these agreements are as follows: Article 25(2) contains a specific provision to take into account the short life cycle and the number of new designs in the textile sector: the requirements for the protection of such designs, in particular as regards costs, testing or publications, may make it possible to request and obtain such protection: not to harm inappropriately. Members are free to fulfil this obligation through design or copyright law. 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 TRIPS Agreement is an agreement on minimum standards that allows members to guarantee, if they so wish, broader protection of intellectual property. Members are free to determine the appropriate method for implementing the provisions of the Agreement in their own legal and practical order. . . .
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