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The United States will continue to work with its trading partners to further enhance IPR protection and enforcement during the coming year.
Best IPR Practices by Trading Partners
USTR highlights the following best practices by trading partners in the area of IPR protection and enforcement:
- USTR supports predictability, transparency, and meaningful engagement between governments and stakeholders in the development of laws, regulations, procedures, and other measures. Stakeholders report that such transparency and participation allow governments to avoid unintended consequences and facilitate stakeholder compliance with legislative and regulatory changes. In late 2014, India initiated a process of soliciting widespread stakeholder input regarding its development of a draft National IPR Policy. USTR encourages continued engagement with interested stakeholders as India continues to develop this policy framework. In contrast, Thailand's failure to address concerns identified by the United States, other foreign governments, and stakeholders has resulted in missed opportunities to address IPR challenges in recent amendments to Thailand's copyright law.
- Cooperation among government agencies is another example of a best practice. Several countries, including the United States, have introduced IPR enforcement coordination mechanisms or agreements to enhance inter-agency cooperation. The United States encourages other trading partners to consider adopting similar cooperative IPR arrangements. In Paraguay and the Philippines, commitment to a whole-of-government approach to IPR enforcement has been critical to enhancing the effectiveness of IPR enforcement and has resulted in positive reports from a number of affected stakeholder groups. In contrast, despite the commitment of individual government agencies and offices, lack of intra-governmental coordination has impeded actions to enforce IPR in Guatemala.
- Several trading partners have participated, or supported participation, in innovative mechanisms that enable government and private sector rights holders to donate or license pharmaceutical patents voluntarily and on mutually-agreed terms and conditions. In these arrangements, parties use existing patent rights to facilitate the diffusion of technology in support of public policy goals. The United States was the first government to share patents with the Medicines Patent Pool, an independent foundation hosted by the World Health Organization (WHO). The United States encourages additional public and private patent holders to explore voluntary licenses with the Medicines Patent Pool as one of many innovative ways to help improve the availability of medicines in developing countries. The patents that the United States shared were related to protease inhibitor medicines, primarily used to treat drug-resistant HIV infections. In addition, the United States, Brazil, and South
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