Empirics prove---international IP agreements are great for development.

These controversies overshadow a real success story the extraordinary achievements of the UN's most effective specialized agency, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). By working relentlessly to raise the level of protection for patents, copyrights, and trademarks worldwide, the WIPO has done more to harness human creativity for social progress than any other international organization in history. The United States, as a world leader in sectors highly dependent on intellectual property protection including aerospace, publishing, computer technology, industrial electronics, pharmaceuticals, motion pictures, and sound recordings naturally plays an active role in the work of the WIPO. Perhaps more surprising, a growing number of developing countries are key players as well. They have come to realize that they need strong intellectual property protection to promote their own economic development and to preserve their cultural traditions.

Adam Smith taught us that the wealth of nations rested on three pillars: labor, capital, and natural resources. Our generation has added a fourth pillar intellectual property in all of its forms: patents to protect new technology, copyrights to protect literary and artistic works as well as computer software, and trademarks to assure orderly commercial development and consumer protection. New systems of intellectual property law protect, for example, integrated circuits and automated databases. Intellectual property also drives the Global Information Infrastructure including the Internet. In each of these areas, the WIPO has worked with member countries to harmonize their legal regimes and to revise their intellectual property law to meet minimum international standards. The WIPO, which today has more than 160 members, was established as a UN agency only three decades ago, but it traces its roots back more than a century. Today, it administers twenty major intellectual property treaties, and it promotes the adoption of needed new treaties. It also works constantly to update existing treaties to make certain that they remain relevant in an age of fast-paced technological change. These treaties include the 1883 Paris Convention on patents and trademarks[2] and the 1886 Berne convention on copyrights.[3]

In recent years, the WIPO has carried out one of its most urgent goals: providing legal and technical assistance in intellectual property to developing countries and to those previously socialist countries now in transition to a free market economy. Its most recent successes were two important new treaties negotiated in December 1996 in Geneva. A new WIPO Copyright Treaty makes clear that authors get full copyright protection for their music and literary works in the digital environment, especially when those works appear on the Internet. A second new treaty, the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty, increases the level of protection for sound recordings, singers, and musicians worldwide and, again, specifies that the performers and the record companies can control the use of their music in cyberspace.

A brief review of the WlPO's principal areas of activity will highlight its major contributions.

PATENTS

Abraham Lincoln, with his usual elegant phrasing and insight, described the essence of the U.S. patent system in 1859. That system, he stated, "added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius.' Lincoln noted that our Founding Fathers wrote patent and copyright protection into the U.S. Constitution we were the first country in history to do and he viewed that action as being one of six major steps in the history of human progress, from the stone age to what was then the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

Some may view Lincoln's characterization as overstated, but the history of the United States is no more accurately recorded than in the vast collection of U.S. patents. From Eli Whitney's cotton gin, patented in 1794 which made King Cotton very profitable and which many historians believe made the Civil War inevitable to the latest inventions in computer technology or biotechnology, the list is seemingly endless: McCormick's reaper, Morse's telegraph, Bell's telephone. Edison's catalogue of 1,000 U.S. patents (including the light bulb, the phonograph, and motion pictures), Eastman's and Land's photographic systems, the Wright brothers' flying machine, Marconi's radio, Colt's revolving-breach pistol, Goddard's liquid fuel rocket, Moyer's production of penicillin, Alvarez's radar, Farnsworth's television, Kilby's and Noyce's integrated circuits, and Stibitz's digital computer to name just a few.

Modern high-technology industries, such as the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, simply could not exist without strong and effective patent laws. A World Bank study found that 65 percent of modern pharmaceutical products would not have been developed or introduced in the absence of adequate intellectual property protection. And just as human needs are without borders, so, too, the legal systems that protect the new technology must extend internationally. As a delegate from the Ivory Coast said at a WIPO meeting in Geneva. "The fight against pirates is like the fight against grasshoppers. If you treat your field with insecticide, it does no long term good unless your neighbor sprays, too." So the WIPO plays a critical role in expanding the reach of the patent laws.

More than a century ago, the Paris Convention established three basic principles of international patent