The Evolutionary Journey of Intellectual Property Rights: From Paris to TRIPS

Intellectual property rights (IPR) didn’t appear overnight. They evolved over more than a century through landmark treaties, international negotiations, and the creation of powerful global institutions. From the first attempts to protect inventions across borders in the 1880s to the binding enforcement mechanisms of the 1990s, the story of IPR is one of nations slowly realizing that ideas, creativity, and innovation need legal protection – not just at home, but worldwide.

Why did intellectual property need international protection? 🔗

Before any international agreements existed, protecting an invention or a creative work was strictly a national affair. An inventor in one country who wanted to protect their invention in another had to navigate entirely separate legal systems, often with no guarantee that their rights would be recognized. Foreign inventors were frequently charged higher fees, given shorter protection periods, or simply denied protection altogether.

This became a serious problem as global trade expanded in the late 19th century. Foreign exhibitors at the 1873 Vienna International Exhibition famously refused to participate over fears that their inventions and designs would be copied without any legal recourse. The incident highlighted a glaring gap: there was no cross-border framework to protect the intellectual output of creators. This led to an international push toward cooperation, and the first major milestone came just a decade later.

The Paris Convention of 1883: protecting industrial property across borders 🔗

The Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property was signed on 20 March 1883 and became one of the first intellectual property treaties in history. Initially, 11 countries – Belgium, Brazil, France, Guatemala, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, El Salvador, Serbia, Spain, and Switzerland – signed the convention. It came into force on 7 July 1884.

The convention covered a broad range of industrial intellectual property, including patents, trademarks, industrial designs, utility models, service marks, trade names, and geographical indications. Its core provisions rested on three pillars:

National treatment: This principle ensured that foreign applicants from member states would receive the same IP protection as nationals of the country where they sought protection. When an applicant files a patent or trademark application in a foreign member country, that application receives the same treatment as one filed by a national of that country.

Right of priority: Article 4 of the Paris Convention established the “Convention priority right,” considered one of its cornerstones. It allows an applicant to use the filing date in one member country as the effective filing date in another, provided a subsequent application is filed within 6 months (for designs and trademarks) or 12 months (for patents).

Common rules: The convention also set certain shared standards that all member countries had to follow, including provisions for temporary protection of inventions exhibited at international exhibitions.

Over the following decades, the Paris Convention was revised multiple times – at Brussels (1900), Washington (1911), The Hague (1925), London (1934), Lisbon (1958), and Stockholm (1967). As of 2025, the convention has 181 contracting member countries and is administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

However, there was one major area the Paris Convention did not address: copyright. The Paris Convention does not cover copyright – that domain was left to a separate treaty that followed just three years later.

The Berne Convention of 1886: a framework for authors and artists 🔗

While the Paris Convention dealt with industrial property, the creative world needed its own protections. The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works was an international assembly held in 1886 in Bern, Switzerland, where ten European countries came together with the goal of agreeing on legal principles for protecting original creative works.

The first version was signed on 9 September 1886 by Belgium, France, Germany, Haiti, Italy, Liberia, Spain, Switzerland, Tunisia, and the United Kingdom.

The Berne Convention introduced several principles that remain foundational to copyright law today.

Automatic protection 🔗

The convention is based on three basic principles and provides a series of provisions establishing the minimum protection to be granted. One of its most revolutionary ideas was that copyright should exist automatically the moment a work is created in a tangible form – no registration or formal application required. This principle of automatic protection was a significant departure from the systems in countries like the United States, which at the time required formal registration.

National treatment 🔗

Similar to the Paris Convention, the Berne Convention required member countries to treat foreign authors no less favourably than their own nationals. A French author’s novel would receive the same copyright protection in Germany as a German author’s work.

Moral rights 🔗

The convention provides for “moral rights” – the right to claim authorship and the right to object to any mutilation, deformation, or modification of a work that would be prejudicial to the author’s honour or reputation.

Minimum protection standards 🔗

Regarding the duration of protection, the general rule under the Berne Convention is that protection must last until 50 years after the author’s death. It also allowed certain limitations and exceptions, such as quotations for educational purposes and reproduction of newspaper articles for reporting current events.

The Berne Convention was revised multiple times over the following century – in Berlin (1908), Rome (1928), Brussels (1948), Stockholm (1967), and Paris (1971), and finally amended in 1979. As of November 2022, the Berne Convention has been ratified by 182 states. However, it has seen no substantive revision since 1971, largely because each member state holds veto power over any change, making updates extremely difficult given the diverse development levels of signatories.

The birth of WIPO in 1967: a unified global institution 🔗

For decades after the Paris and Berne Conventions were established, their administrative functions were handled by separate bureaus. In 1893, the two bureaus merged to form the United International Bureau for the Protection of Intellectual Property, known by its French acronym BIRPI, headquartered in Bern.

As the IP landscape grew more complex, the need for a more robust international institution became clear. The World Intellectual Property Organization was established by a convention signed in Stockholm in 1967, began operations in 1970, and became a specialized agency of the United Nations in December 1974. WIPO is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.

What does WIPO do? 🔗

WIPO’s aims are twofold: first, it promotes the protection of intellectual property through international cooperation; second, it supervises administrative cooperation between the Paris, Berne, and other intellectual property unions. Today, the organization administers more than 20 international intellectual property treaties.

WIPO’s role in enforcing intellectual property protections increased in the mid-1990s when it signed a cooperation agreement with the World Trade Organization. With the growth of e-commerce and the internet, WIPO also took on the responsibility of helping resolve disputes over internet domain names – a challenge that the 19th-century drafters of the Paris and Berne Conventions could never have anticipated.

WIPO’s membership now consists of more than 180 countries, and its main policy-making body is the General Assembly.

The TRIPS Agreement of 1995: IPR meets global trade 🔗

While the Paris and Berne Conventions established important principles, they had a significant weakness: the Paris Convention lacked a system to enforce industrial intellectual property, and compliance depended largely on the goodwill of member countries. There was no binding mechanism to hold nations accountable for failing to protect IP rights.

That changed with the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). The TRIPS Agreement came into effect on 1 January 1995 and is to date the most comprehensive multilateral agreement on intellectual property.

How TRIPS was different 🔗

TRIPS was negotiated at the end of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) between 1989 and 1990 and is administered by the WTO. It marked the first time intellectual property law was formally linked to the international trading system.

What made TRIPS particularly powerful was its mandatory nature. Membership in the WTO is a “package deal,” meaning that WTO members cannot pick and choose among agreements – they are bound by all multilateral WTO agreements, including TRIPS.

Building on Paris and Berne 🔗

TRIPS incorporates and builds upon the most recent versions of the Paris Convention and the Berne Convention – agreements that go back to the 1880s. Because of this, the TRIPS Agreement is sometimes described as a “Berne and Paris-plus” agreement, as it adds substantial obligations in areas where the older conventions were silent or inadequate.

Key features of TRIPS 🔗

Minimum standards: TRIPS establishes minimum standards for the availability, scope, and use of seven forms of intellectual property: copyrights, trademarks, geographical indications, industrial designs, patents, layout designs for integrated circuits, and trade secrets.

Enforcement mechanisms: Unlike other IP agreements, TRIPS has a powerful enforcement mechanism – states can be disciplined through the WTO’s dispute settlement system. The agreement specifies detailed procedures for civil and criminal remedies, border measures, and provisional actions to help rights holders enforce their IP.

Balancing public interest: Article 7 of TRIPS states that IP protection should contribute to the promotion of technological innovation and the transfer of technology, in a manner conducive to social and economic welfare and to a balance of rights and obligations. Article 8 recognizes the rights of members to adopt measures for public health and other public interest reasons.

Transition periods for developing countries: Developed countries had one year to bring their legislation in line with TRIPS. Developing countries and transitioning economies were given five years, while least-developed countries were given eleven years.

The Doha Declaration and access to medicines 🔗

TRIPS was not without controversy. Since it came into force, it has faced criticism from developing countries, academics, and NGOs, particularly regarding its impact on access to affordable medicines.

In 2001, at the WTO ministerial meeting in Doha, Qatar, countries agreed to reaffirm the primacy of health over commercial interests. The Doha Declaration restated countries’ right to use TRIPS safeguards such as compulsory licences and parallel importation to promote access to medicines. This was a landmark moment in recognizing that IP protection must be balanced with broader social needs, especially in public health.

From Paris to TRIPS: key takeaways from the IPR evolution 🔗

The journey of intellectual property rights from 1883 to the present offers several important lessons about how the global legal framework developed.

From voluntary to binding: The earliest conventions relied on goodwill and voluntary compliance. The TRIPS Agreement changed this fundamentally by linking IP obligations to the global trading system, giving them real enforcement teeth through the WTO’s dispute settlement mechanism.

From narrow to comprehensive: The Paris Convention focused on industrial property, and the Berne Convention on literary and artistic works. TRIPS brought all major forms of IP – from patents and copyrights to trade secrets and geographical indications – under a single framework.

From Western-centric to global: The initial treaties were signed by a handful of European and Latin American countries. Today, these agreements cover over 180 nations, reflecting the truly global nature of IP protection.

From creators-only to balancing public interest: Early IP frameworks focused almost exclusively on protecting creators and inventors. Over time, the system has evolved to incorporate provisions for public health, education, and the needs of developing economies – though debates about this balance continue.

The evolution of IPR is not a finished story. With the rise of artificial intelligence, digital content, and biotechnology, the frameworks built in the 19th and 20th centuries face new challenges that their original drafters could not have foreseen. How these treaties adapt – or whether entirely new ones emerge – will shape the next chapter of intellectual property law.

What do you think? Has the shift from voluntary cooperation to binding trade obligations through TRIPS been the right approach for protecting intellectual property globally? And as new technologies like AI challenge traditional notions of authorship and invention, do you think the current international IP framework is equipped to handle what comes next?

References

1. https://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/text/288514
2. https://www.wipo.int/en/web/treaties/ip/berne/summary_berne
3. https://www.britannica.com/topic/World-Intellectual-Property-Organization
4. https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/intel2_e.htm
5. https://www.uspto.gov/ip-policy/patent-policy/trade-related-aspects-ip-rights