Programme

6.15pm - Registration

6.30pm - Lecture starts

7.30pm - Lecture ends

IP Policy Making in the 21st century; The Trans-Pacific Partnership, a "Made in America" Agreement

Increasingly, bilateral and multilateral trade negotiations have become vehicles for norm setting on intellectual property. Recently concluded, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a “made in America” trade agreement among twelve Pacific Rim countries, devise a trade model for intellectual property.

The TPP is a "trade" deal that, ironically, deals little with trade. Of the TPP’s 30 chapters, only five address traditional trade issues. Significant concerns have been raised about both secrecy (negotiations held behind closed doors with details kept from public) and context of the agreement.

Seven years of closed-door negotiations over the TPP and its intellectual property provisions concluded last October. The final TPP text officially published in November confirms critics’ worst fears about the real agenda. It includes an array of binding rules that, if enacted, will tie the hands of national legislatures, restricting their ability to advance public interest policies regarding important issues like public health, education, access to knowledge and Internet governance.

The TPP still has a long way to go. The agreement has to be ratified by all 12 negotiating countries--in many that is a complicated process. The public debate over the TPP has been a lot more robust and educational than the any other US trade agreement. Opposition to the TPP is growing in the US and in many of the other countries involved.

Speaker

Burcu Kilic, Ph.D., Legal and Policy Director, Public Citizen, is an expert on legal, economic and political issues surrounding intellectual property law & policy, trade, development and innovation. She provides technical and legal assistance to governments and civil society groups around the world and promotes their participation in international rule making. She has performed research and written extensively on these subjects. Her latest book "Boosting Pharmaceutical Innovation in the Post-TRIPS Era; Real Life Lessons for the Developing World" illustrates the critical role that intellectual property strategies play within access and innovation. She completed her Ph.D. at Queen Mary, University of London as a School of Law Fellow. She holds Masters degrees from University of London and Stockholm University in Intellectual Property Law and Law and Information Technology and a law degree from Ankara University. She is also a SARChI Research Fellow at Institute for Economic Research on Innovation, Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa.