High risk of spillover impacts from global IP law because of interdependence

Finally, the growing activities in the various international regimes have made salient the spill-over effects and unintended consequences of intellectual property protection, as well as the high complex interdependence among policies in different issue areas. Today, intellectual property protection has impacted a wide variety of areas, including agriculture, health, the environment, education, culture, competition, free speech, privacy, democracy and the rule of law. The access-to-essential-medicines problem, for example, has raised difficult issues concerning public health, human rights, institutional infrastructure and government expenditures, in addition to the protection of pharmaceutical patents and clinical trial data. Likewise, the protection of traditional knowledge and cultural expressions implicates human rights, indigenous rights, cultural patrimony, biological diversity, agricultural productivity, food security, environmental sustainability, business ethics, global competition, scientific research, sustainable development and wealth distribution.25