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Rebalancing Trips, Molly K. Land

Molly K. Land

In recent years, global intellectual property scholarship has been preoccupied with “rehabilitating” the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS). With some distance from the polarizing rhetoric that accompanied the early years of TRIPS, contemporary accounts laud the treaty as far more flexible and sensitive to the needs of developing countries than had previously been believed. This article argues that, contrary to these accounts, the fears of developing countries concerning TRIPS have indeed been realized—just not in the manner they imagined at the time of its conclusion. Although TRIPS does contain significant flexibilities, states have largely failed to take …