Treaties are good for developing economies and middle-income countries pressure everyone else to get on board.

Just as the Global South has become increasingly frustrated by the Global North’s incessant demands for higher international intellectual property standards, a group of middle-income countries seemed to have found a formula for success. In the past two decades, these countries selectively adapted international intellectual property standards, to the extent allowed by the TRIPS Agreement and acquiesced by the more powerful WTO members.18 As a result, this group of emerging countries gradually obtained a greater share of the benefits provided by the TRIPSbased international intellectual property regime. As former WTO Director-General Roberto Azevêdo recalled: [I]n 1995, and earlier in the negotiations leading to the conclusion of TRIPS, the international [intellectual property] system was largely seen as a trade interest of the developed economies. Today, the picture differs dramatically. Some middle-income countries are among the major users of the global [intellectual property] system, and many other developing countries are increasingly engaged with it.19

Brazil, China, and India are oft-cited examples. Together with Russia and South Africa, they are frequently discussed in the context of the BRICS countries. Other fast-growing emerging countries have also received similar benefits from the WTO and the TRIPS-based international intellectual property regime. In a book chapter written about a decade ago, I identified the ten largest economies outside the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that had a gross national income per capita of less than US$15,000, but some of the world’s highest volumes of high-technology exports. 20 Referring to them as “middle intellectual property powers,” that chapter highlighted the considerable economic and technological improvements in the world’s fast-growing middle-income countries (see Tables 1 and 2). In addition to the BRICS countries, the ten surveyed economies included Argentina, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand.

Based on the 2022 Global Innovation Index, five of the selected countries ranked within the world’s top fifty: China (11th), Malaysia (36th), India (40th), Thailand (43rd), and Russia (47th). 23 The rest were within the world’s top 75: Brazil (54th), the Philippines (59th), South Africa (61st), Argentina (69th), and Indonesia (75th). Apart from these countries, Vietnam, a fast growing lower-middle-income country with the world’s fifteenth largest population, also earned a top fifty spot in the latest index, placing at forty-eighth. Using the criteria outlined in my earlier chapter, one could certainly expand the list of “middle intellectual property powers” to include fast-growing emerging countries such as Vietnam.

While the intellectual property policy positions of many middle-income countries have remained close to those of other developing countries, some of these positions have begun to shift toward and align with their developed counterparts. Not only do the two groups of countries share similar aspirations, but some middle-income countries have also become more willing to embrace, at times reluctantly, higher intellectual property standards in international or regional negotiations. 24 Cases in point are the positions taken by Malaysia and Vietnam in the TPP negotiations and by China and the less developed ASEAN members in the RCEP negotiations. As their economic and technological conditions continue to improve, middle-income countries will only become more active in persuading their developing country allies to support their negotiating and policy positions.

Given these rapidly changing geopolitical, economic, and policy landscapes, it is high time that we reassessed the debate on international intellectual property law and policy.25 Although the North–South debate has been widely used in international relations and has successfully captured the tensions and conflicts between developed and developing countries in the past few decades, that debate does not fully reflect the ongoing developments in the international intellectual property regime. As middle-income countries continue to improve both economically and technologically, and as other low-income countries move up the economic ladder to become lowermiddle-income countries, the gap between the Global North and the Global South will drastically reduce. Meanwhile, the challenges confronting least developed countries, which have necessitated the repeated extensions of the TRIPS transition period, will remain. In short, the debate on intellectual property, innovation, and global inequality will become more complex than a simplistic binary North–South debate.