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Regulatory Data Protection Under Trips Article 39(3) And Article 10bis Of The Paris Convention: Is There A Doctor In The House?, Christopher Wadlow

Christopher Wadlow

Article 39 of the WTO TRIPs Agreement has attracted much attention for the protection its final paragraph affords for regulatory data in the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries, but the literature has tended to treat Article 39(3) in individual isolation. This is to ignore one of the most striking features of Article 39, which is that in contrast to every other substantive provision of TRIPs, it expressly defines its entire scope of application by reference to a pre-existing treaty, the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, and specifically Article 10bis of the latter, dealing with unfair competition. This article …