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In the world of food safety, maintaining HACCP compliance is paramount. Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) is a systematic approach to identifying, evaluating, and controlling food safety hazards. It’s a crucial framework that ensures food products’ safety and consumers’ well-being. This blog will explore how to maintain HACCP compliance and ensure a safe food safety process in your establishment. Discover HACCP’s key steps and principles to keep your food products and customers safe.

Understanding HACCP Compliance

The fight against fraud is an ongoing one. Financial institutions must rely on strong measures to secure their operations and consumers as technology improves and criminals become more savvy. Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) processes are crucial among these precautions. However, the question is whether KYC and AML rules alone are sufficient to prevent fraud.

The Function of KYC and AML Protocols

Since Erie, the federal courts have developed discrete bodies of “federal common law” – that is, judicially developed rules that have the status of federal, national law (and which, therefore, displace contrary state law). The Supreme Court held in its 1964 Sabbatino decision, for example, that the “act of state doctrine,” whereby courts are to treat as valid the acts of foreign sovereigns taken within their territories, is a rule of federal common law binding on state courts. Some commentators have argued that all of customary international law should, like the act of state doctrine, be viewed as having the status of federal common law. If accepted, this argument would mean that courts would have broad authority to invalidate state laws deemed inconsistent with emerging norms of customary international law – perhaps, for example, concerning the death penalty. It might even mean that courts could enforce customary international law against the executive branch, and potentially even use it (as they can self-executing treaties) to override earlier-in-time federal statutes.

Public international law interacts with intellectual property laws in numerous negotiating fora and intergovernmental organisations. I have long been envious of my public international law colleagues; their field has been through many cycles of purposive meaning-making, including holding on to a sense of direction of the world order, and normative scholarship as a transformative project. In contrast, international intellectual property law has remained mired in its private law origins, unable or unwilling beyond some very important but limited pockets (see here and here), to confront how these rights work to entrench and enhance existing imbalances in wealth and power. For this reason, it is significant that the first intervention during the pandemic by an eminent public international lawyer is to call for a termination of the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement.

In her elegantly pitched 2022 Annual Michael Kirby lecture, Prof Orford raises the prospect of applying rebus sic stantibus, a modification of obligations initially assumed by parties to the TRIPS Agreement due to a change in material circumstances. Prof Orford pokes substantive holes at the aura of solidity and self-evidence with which the core elements of the TRIPS agreement are defended to show instead that the basis of the agreement is precarious and historically contingent. From this perspective, the TRIPS waiver becomes a campaign against ‘false necessity’ – a recognition that the presuppositions of the international patent system are far from a natural order of things and is merely what we have ‘temporarily refrained from challenging and remaking’.

The better explanation is maximization. The TRIPS Agreement was notable because it required countries to meet certain minimum standards of IP protection.130 However, upon conclusion of the agreement, interest groups and member countries immediately stepped up efforts to tailor protection.131 For developed countries with strong creative or innovative industries—the Global North—this meant strategic moves to increase protection through forum-shifting and bilateral or regional trade agreements.132 It is an effort that has continued to the most recent regional trade agreement negotiations. At the same time, developing countries and scholars concerned about access to medicine and other potential problems associated with high levels of IP protection began exploring interpretations of the TRIPS Agreement that allowed for more flexibility in the agreement’s implementation.133 Least developed countries joined some of these interpretive efforts but have also sought to extend the period of transition, thereby postponing the date on which they need to comply with the minimum requirements.134 But ultimately, the developed countries have been more successful in increasing global IP protection. This is because various provisions in the TRIPS Agreement are geared towards maximization. There was a flurry of post-TRIPS treaties, termed TRIPS-plus by many, that resulted in new—and higher—minimum standards of IP protection that were pushed on developing countries piecemeal, rather than going through the onerous and difficult processes established for amending the TRIPS Agreement.135 While this trend runs counter to the stated harmonizing purposes of the TRIPS Agreement, it is enabled by TRIPS provisions. This Part discusses how the TRIPS Agreement and other treaties allow for disharmonization only for changes that increase IP rights protection and describes the proliferation of IP treaties, following the TRIPS Agreement, that increase levels of IP protection.

A. IP Treaty Provisions: Tools of Maximization, Not Harmonization

Most issues addressed by the body of CIL that developed during its classical period (up through the 19th Century) can be characterized as symmetric: you protect my diplomats, and I’ll protect yours. Let’s call this type of exchange “identical performance reciprocity.” This is Friedmann’s law of coordination, and it is easier to make, and to enforce, if everyone has symmetric interests.27

However, identical performance reciprocity leaves no room for diverse preferences or comparative advantage. In more modern times, with the development of the need for an international law of cooperation, it makes perfect sense in many areas for states to make reciprocal commitments that involve different performances by each state (let’s call this “diverse performance reciprocity”). States have varying preferences, and varying comparative advantage in regulation. For example, you reduce your carbon emissions and I will reduce my tariff on computers from 30% to 10% in exchange for State B reducing its tariff on bananas from 25% to 20%. Or perhaps State A wants State B to provide greater protection to intellectual property rights. Both are types of diverse performance reciprocity. As compared with identical performance reciprocity, diverse performance reciprocity responds to the fact that different states have different situations, different capabilities, and different preferences.

The areas of intellectual property that it covers are: copyright and related rights (i.e. the rights of performers, producers of sound recordings and broadcasting organizations); trademarks including service marks; geographical indications including appellations of origin; industrial designs; patents including the protection of new varieties of plants; the layout-designs of integrated circuits; and undisclosed information including trade secrets and test data.

The three main features of the Agreement are:

A trademark registered in the United States offers valuable protections for your business. Your registered trademark will provide the presumption of nationwide validity, which means you’ll be protected from potential infringement anywhere throughout the United States. Unfortunately, any trademark disputes that arise outside the U.S. will not be covered by these protections. In order to gain trademark protections outside the United States, you must register your trademark in other countries.

In today’s global economy, it’s not too farfetched to assume that a business of any size may one day reach other countries. This is especially true of online retailers, who may sell goods outside the United States, and even businesses manufacturing goods overseas. Whether you plan market your brand to customers in Europe or make your products in China, international trademarks can be a valuable asset to your business, and often necessary to your success outside the United States.

The TRIPS Agreement is a core component of the WTO’s set of agreements, and is likely to be a fixture of future international trade agreements despite the controversy surrounding its implementation. All WTO member countries are required to comply with the Agreement’s requirements (with the exception of countries that are not bound until 2013), or risk retaliatory trade sanctions. The TRIPS Agreement does not discriminate between member countries despite the absence of a theoretical rationale for the establishment of a single harmonised set of IPR protection mechanisms across countries. All countries, regardless of IPR protection starting point or development level, have to comply with harmonised standards to fulfil their obligations.

We develop an empirical model using a broad panel dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of the TRIPS Agreement in tightening IPR protection across a range of countries. There are three important observations that can be made of the empirical estimates. First, domestic factors are important determinants of IPR protection, as measured by our modified version of G&P’s (1997) index. This result is consistent with the findings of other authors on similar topics who have found that income, education, governance and domestic R&D activity generate stronger IPR protection.

TRIPS is remarkable from both the viewpoint of past trade liberalization efforts undertaken under the aegis of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the precursor to the WTO, and from the perspective of international coordination of IPRs as pursued by numerous previous treaties and agreements in the context of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). From the perspective of trade institutions and traditions, TRIPS broke from the past by attacking the somewhat arcane issues of IPRs, an entirely new subject matter. In so doing the agreement reaches beyond the border measures that had been, up to that point, the almost exclusive domain of trade liberalization efforts. The need to justify such a less-than-obvious extension of the reach of GATT was very much emphasized by the carefully worded prefix ‘trade-related’ that was used to characterize the new subject matter. From the perspective of previous international efforts at coordinating national IPR rules, TRIPS is remarkable because it bundled together the main provisions of the major (and hitherto separate) international IPR agreements, because it strengthened the requirements of existing agreements in some crucial areas, and because it included the final package as a required element for participation in the WTO (as part of the ‘single undertaking’ process for ratification). Furthermore, enforcement of international IPRs, essentially nonexistent under WIPO, under TRIPS can rely on the WTO dispute settlement mechanism and on the threat of trade sanctions for noncompliance. This expansion of the scope of WTO activities is likely to have important long-run consequences. As one observer put it soon after the conclusion of the Uruguay round, “The farmers and the issues of agricultural subsidies have the limelight. TRIPS, however, will over time play a bigger role in the global economic drama” (Drahos, 1995).

The TRIPS Agreement is an integral part of the law of the World Trade Organization (WTO). It stands alongside GATT and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS)15 in the WTO covered agreements package.16 There is much debate over the role of intellectual property in the world trade arena. On the one hand, the developed countries, particularly the United States and the European Union, pushed hard for such an agreement because as the world leaders in production of intellectual property products they had, and continue to have, a comparative advantage to maintain. On the other hand, some developing countries signed the TRIPS Agreement as a necessary part of the WTO package, which promised better access to markets for goods.17 Some of these benefits have come to fruition, but in some areas most notably access to key markets relating to agriculture and textiles, the benefits are a long time coming. The proposition that protecting intellectual property is important for international trade pre-dates the TRIPS Agreement.18 However, the creation of the TRIPS Agreement. represented a significant leap in international agreements on the relationship between trade and intellectual property.

Despite the growth of intellectual property in international trade it remains a territorial creature, and an owner of an intellectual property right must claim that right on a territory-by- territory basis.19 An owner can extend its rights from its country of origin across international boundaries in several ways. These modes of extending intellectual property rights internationally fall into two broad categories. The first category is through selling or licensing the intellectual property rights in other territories. The second category is where the owner exports products or services embodying its intellectual property rights to a foreign territory. In both of these categories the rights owner must rely on local intellectual property laws. There are of course many variables on these two categories; an owner could adopt the first method in one territory and the second in another, but the two groupings form the possible ways in which intellectual property rights fall into the channels of international trade. Both methods of protecting intellectual property rights have been features of international intellectual property law in one way or another for some time.

The size and vigour of counterfeit commerce raises several interpretive questions concerning authenticity, trust and meaning. Walter Benjamin’s (2002) famous contribution to the sociology of culture on the consequences of mechanical reproduction, points to issues of originality, politics and status differentiation in the consumption of duplicates. When the volume and scale of the global counterfeit trade nowadays is factored in, together with the subject of consumer motivation, especially in the matter of consuming non-deceptive counterfeits, the issues multiply in range and complexity (3). Structurally speaking, the world of commodities exchanged under copyright and patent is mirrored by a counter-world consisting of illegal relations of production, distribution and exchange that are resistant to detection, policing and control. Counterfeit commerce certainly breaks the law. However, when viewed from the logic of the general consumption process under capitalism it is also the rational extension of consumer activity into ‘hyper consumerism’ (Hayward 2004: 86) i.e. a form of subjective desire to accumulate goods and services that privileges the drive to consume above respect for contract in order to acquire price advantage or distinction (Hayward 2004: 86; Moxon 2011).

What does it mean to propose that counterfeit commerce is the extension of general consumerism into ‘hyper consumerism’? The capitalist mode of production assigns great weight to the consumption of goods and services as a mark of distinction (Bourdieu 1984). Counter cultures of consumption and anti-consumerist movements, in general, merely confirm this predominance since what they are reacting to, and ultimately reinforcing, is the normative assumption that equates status with sought after consumption. Hyper-consumption assigns status to unauthorized consumption and applies a variety of pretexts to support this interpretation. Thus, save in one respect, hyper-consumerism is faithful to the general status accumulation process of the authorized price mechanism. The proviso in question refers to the illegal basis of the relationships of production, distribution and exchange in counterfeit commerce. By flagrantly flouting legal regulations it might be inferred that counterfeit commerce renders morality forfeit. In reality, producers and consumers regard counterfeit status as providing no moral impediment to exchange. A different kind of consumer judgement about morality and authenticity appears to be operational here. Counter hierarchies of status, flexible moral judgements about production and consumption and global shadow networks of distinction, identity and difference built around the production, distribution and exchange of counterfeits have become normalized. Rutter and Bryce (2008:1158) submit that the purchase and consumption of counterfeit goods is a routine component of everyday life. It extends over all ages, ethnicities and is gender neutral. In emphasizing the ordinary quality of exchange, Rutter and Bryce (2008) problematize the commonsense twinning of counterfeit consumption with crime. Indeed, it has been suggested that non-deceptive counterfeits fulfil two sorts of consumer demand that are not satisfied by authorized production. In the first place they supply the demand to acquire positive status differentiation through the accumulation of luxury goods and affordable prices. Consecutively, they fulfil the need of some consumers to comment upon the vanity and waste of the luxury goods industry (Arellano 1994; Hilton, Choi and Chen 2004). Normalization suggests that the trade correlates with moral elasticity. That is, consumers refuse to designate trademark violation as regular crime. The elasticity in question relates to a variety of concrete issues of consumer motivation bearing upon, inter alia, issues of price advantage, value for money, one upmanship and the economic and cultural pretensions of the authorized trade particularly, in luxury goods. Before taking up these issues in greater detail, it is necessary to remark briefly upon the main social interests adversely affected by the trade in fake goods.

The parasitic nature of counterfeit commerce is the chief impediment to mitigating or erasing it. The key to understanding the dynamics of counterfeit commerce correctly lies in this. The imperative of capitalism is to extract surplus value in ever more inventive ways. It aims to accomplish this by dual, interrelated means. Firstly, driving down the costs of production in order to build a margin realized at point of exchange; and secondly, driving up hierarchies of positive status differentiation that make the propensity to consume so intoxicating as to be irresistible. Counterfeit commerce is the parasitic counter culture of this. It deploys illegal means to accomplish precisely the same ends. When all is said and done their market position derives from offering acceptable duplicates at affordable prices. The moral objections to the trade need to be tempered by a sociological understanding of the immense opportunities for extracting surplus value that are produced by the general pricing mechanism under capitalism. The unavoidable logic of capitalism is to produce opportunities for undercutting the legitimate market and fiddling. A vast, global inverse culture of consumption, that unapologetically robs Peter to pay Paul by audaciously violating fidelity to contract, constitutes the shadow land of the general price mechanism. Despite the admonitions and interventions of the law enforcement lobby, one is struck not by the precariousness of counterfeit commerce, but by its extraordinary tenacity.

When scholars come to the recent changes in intellectual property law, unfortunately, more often than not they are overly concerned with one part of the elephant, that in which they have become highly specialized. For instance, those who are focused on copyright issues discuss the Copyright Acts of 1976 and 1998, and the threats that copyright expansion poses to Internet users with regard to the fair use doctrine, freedom of speech, and even access to culture (Lessig 2004; Vaidhyanathan 2001; Gordon 1989; Netanel 1996). In contrast, authors who are occupied with patents debate the patenting of living organisms, the role of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, created in 1982,1 the changes in the markets for technical knowledge, and so on (Merges 1987; Mazzoleni and Nelson 1998; Cockburn, Kortum, and Stern 2002). In turn, authors interested in trademarks focus on anticounterfeiting measures, the expansion of the scope of trademarks, and so on (Port 1993). Among international scholars who focus on the Global South, there are concerns about costs for the less developed countries of the international IP order established by the TRIPS agreement (Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) (Richards 2004; Correa 2000a; Correa 2000b; Sell 2004; Drahos and Braithwaite 2002). The list could be continued ad nauseam.

So what is wrong with the existing research? Nothing, except that it misses the big picture, and therefore the relationship of intellectual property with the totality of capitalism. Each one of these approaches is right when it points to a pillar, a rope, or a solid pipe. But that does not tell us what the elephant looks like nowadays: Intellectual property now is a totality, a system.

However, the fact that we can even name and shame Green and Amoruso is a privilege which we must fight to keep in the online age. The labyrinthian nature of the online world makes it increasingly hard to understand who is behind, and therefore responsible for, online businesses. Recently, the brands that ousted Topshop and the like from the top of the market have faced competition from a new host of online stores. Sites such as SHEIN, Romwe and Rose Gal sell a cornucopia of clothes at cut-throat prices. The legitimacy of such sites has been repeatedly called into question. Customers complain about clothes being far different to how they are advertised, or orders never showing up. Perhaps what is most concerning is the seeming lack of real people behind these businesses. There is little insight into who actually owns or runs such companies; in 2019, El Mundo reported that the supposed founder of SHEIN may not even exist. Although poor performance and customer dissatisfaction are serious issues, a lack of clarity on ownership and control is the most dangerous aspect of e-commerce. With the ghostliness of online business revealed, any promise of true accountability disappears.

“A commitment to unrestrained capitalism and an increasingly deregulated system has bred a financial culture of concealment and evasion”

Other moves toward trademark maximalism—for instance the passage of the Trademark Counterfeiting Act of 1984—operated to set up and parallel dilution law by criminalizing trademark infringement and reinforcing racial ized constructions of counterfeiters. Together with the racialized rhetorics of the Sampling Wars—and even evolving linkages between whiteness and expertise—intellectual property law in this era replicated its racial invest ments through the language of morality and criminality. The collision of numerous social wars reflected and constructed an increasingly militarized and racialized way of thinking about racial capitalism and consumer goods while maintaining an appearance of race neutrality.

In short, intellectual property law, a site for the simultaneous projection and creation of anxieties about race, national identity, economic prosperity, personhood, and morality, continued to invoke racial scripts and racial feel ings that denigrated creatorship by people of color and elevated creatorship by whites in the race liberal era. In the postracial era, intellectual properties continued to operate as deeply racialized spaces, increasingly through the revival of rhetorics of individual self-determination.

Trademark law, which existed at only a state level until the mid-1900s,139 both amplified and quelled national desires and anxieties associated with race, national identity, citizenship, and economic prosperity. Passed in 1946, the nation’s first federal trademark statute, the Lanham Act,140 played a central role in perpetuating and reinforcing the whiteness of U.S. citizenship as well as racial hierarchies from the Antebellum Era that Emancipation disrupted.141 Yet unlike copyright and patent law, trademark law did not explicitly exclude certain groups from protection. Instead, it produced a legal framework through which racial hierarchies could be normalized and managed visually, in consumer spaces

Along with a precipitous rise in U.S. trademark registrations in the 1900s, “product consciousness had become so crucial a part of national history and popular self-identity that the public’s relation to business took on a patriotic value.”142 Rosemary Coombe, citing Michael Warner, notes that trademarks are “constitutive parts of a public sphere—constructing a common discourse to bind the subject to the nation and to its markets,”143 while Richard Schur comments that “[c]irculation of racial imagery is not simply an accidental effect of the current trademark system but a fundamental element of its logic.”144

According to Hou, (2014) online media have not touched the balance between men and women in accessing technology. Indonesia has a female population that is still below men but with a figure that is not too far away, but the percentage of gender gap in technology is still greater than the percentage ratio of population based on gender. This is supported by data owned by the Indonesian Information and Communication Technology Creative Industry Society or Masyarakat Industri Kreatif Teknologi Informasi dan Komunikasi Indonesia (MIKTI) together with BeKraf, it appears that the majority of start-up companies in Indonesia were founded by men (91.18%), while women only accounted for 8.82% of the total founding. According to Hilbert (2011), there is a tendency for women to experience technophobia compared to men. Existing stereotypes also help shape this phobia pattern. One of the stereotypes in Indonesia related to the role of women in the world of work, women still portrayed as being gentle and unable to handle the various roles and tasks that have been dominated by men. Gender stereotypes about the information technology industry also create the myth that men are better at dealing with "hardware" technological problems that require logic and mathematical concepts. This stereotype assumes that women are better at human skills about "nurturing, emotional expression, and communication activities" while men are better at "instrumental and task-oriented jobs" (Widjajani, 2013).

Taken from Business Insider Singapore, shows that men occupy 65% of management positions in the e-commerce industry and the rest are only filling by women. In the head-level position, the number of women is almost equivalent to men, which is 55% for men and 45% for women. In the VP-level position, the number of men is 61%, while women must be satisfied with the number of 39%. The higher the level, the further the woman lags, conical upwards. In SVP-level, men reach 80% and women occupy the rest. Then in the C-level position which becomes the top position in a company, women only reach 17% and men so dominate up to 83%. In addition there is a description of the way women work as dualism: home vs. work, IT vs. work emotion, intuition vs. analysis, and so on (Nielsen in (Widjajani, 2013). These stereotypes because the hierarchical structure in the IT world to be dominating by men at the top level, while women occupy low-level positions.

Recent years have also seen a series of new publications on the history of corruption in Europe. These studies have shown that corruption as an idea and discourse, as well as a practice, played an important role in the history of modern politics and state-building processes. These works have highlighted the complexity of corruption in the modern era, for example, that corrupt practices continued to exist even though “modern” elites proclaimed they had freed their regimes from them. Moreover, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, accusations and debates about corruption served to initiate reform or, simply, as a pretext to undermine old structures and representatives of the so-called “Ancien Régime”.4 Therefore, anticorruption campaigns could and were also used as political weapons, to get rid of opponents and to promote politicised institutional reforms.5 Additionally, several historians have argued that the understanding of corruption as well as the link between corruption and political reform entered a new phase somewhere towards the end of the eighteenth century. From that moment onwards, instead of simply being a word to be used for a great variety of deviations (sexual, moral, religious, administrative), corruption became more often defined in political terms as the misuse of public office or the general interest for private gain. Moreover, it became an absolutely non-tolerable phenomenon in the public arena. This does not mean, of course, that corruption ceased to exist; rather, corruption became a more serious and challenging problem in terms of political legitimacy.6 As a result, a new political discourse developed in which corruption was portrayed as a remnant of “traditional” societies—in which “Ancien Régime” practices such as patronage and clientelism were rampant—that could be eliminated if the appropriate “modern” reforms were adopted.

Although, there is still debate among historians about how sharp the break with the past really was7—see also the contribution to this volume by Jens Ivo Engels and Frédéric Monier—these insights that have been framed in the context of European history can bring valuable perspectives to the history of colonialism and empire. For example, it can help us to locate the development and consequences of the idea that corruption was a problem of traditional regimes and that it belonged to a geographical “Other”: the colony and its local culture and inhabitants. This argument was used by European colonial elites in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to justify colonial rule: it was legitimate as it would end corruption and bring modernity, so it was argued. Indeed, if corruption had already been present in the Enlightenment’s idea of “Oriental despotism”, it now became part of the civilising discourse of nineteenth-century European colonialism.8 As such, the study of colonial corruption allows the tackling of historiographical debates about the ideological fundaments of civilising discourses, modernisation programs and the legitimacy of colonial rule, which is an important theme in the history of colonialism (as well as in postcolonial and decolonisation studies, too).9

This anecdote attracts both our cultural and legal attention. Capturing the central role of trademarks in national culture, it also points to a politics of ownership and protest. Accounting for its significance theoretically, however, is no easy task. Somehow, it resists easy accomodation in any of the dominant approaches towards the commodified imagery of late capitalism. Neither Jameson's (1991) modernist nostalgia for our "real" history (now lost in the proliferation of media imagery), nor cultural studies celebration of consumption as a potential practice of resistance and self-affirmation (Ross 1988; Mercer 1989), nor Walter Benjamin's optimism for the transcendant potential of the commodity's fetishism (see Taussig 1993), do justice to the dilemma posed by the GollyR. Even the postcolonial remains somehow inadequate to characterize contemporary challenges to the circulation of those commodified signs that continue to embody colonialism's Others in conditions of mass commerce.

Scholars developing the concept of the "public sphere" (Calhoun 1993; Garnham 1993; Polan 1993) advocate increased attention to the cultural politics that engage the commodified signs of mass media culture because of their significance in making contemporary politics and producing subjectivities. Mass media defines and codes desire: as Michael Warner puts it, "we have brand names all over us" (1993:242). Trademarks, he suggests, are constitutive parts of a public sphere--constructing a common discourse to bind the subject to the nation and to its markets (243). I would hasten to add that some of "us" and our ancestors are, in fact, legally brand names: Cherokees, Oneida, Seminoles, Winnebago, Crazy Horse, Aunt Jemima, and Uncle Ben. Some of "us" may have trademarks all over our bodies, others of "us" have bodies that are all over the commercial landscape as trademarks.