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Trips And Bits: An Essay On Compulsory Licenses, Expropriation, And International Arbitration, Peter B. Rutledge

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This essay examines the potential for arbitration to resolve disputes between private companies and developing countries over the propriety of compulsory licenses. At bottom, my thesis is that arbitration supplies the medium through which to mediate the tension between the profit-seeking goals of private multinational companies and the development goals of foreign nations, especially in the developing world. The compulsory license debate raises a clash of fundamental interests between the patent holder, the patent holder’s state, and the host state. Arbitration can play an important role in balancing those interests, albeit a highly unusual one. Arbitration provides an essential forum …