ABSTRACT
The period since 1995 has seen the greatest expansion of global protection for intellectual property rights (IPRs) in history. This fundamental policy shift covers multiple dimensions, including bringing most of the world comprehensively into a more harmonized system, extending legal standards and enforcement expectations across virtually all areas of intellectual property, and tightly linking such regulations to international trade and investment policy. It is no exaggeration to state that IPRs have been elevated from an obscure bit of backwater regulatory policy to the top rank of international structural concerns. Policymakers in nearly all countries now posit that effectively protecting IPRs is a sine qua non for promoting economic growth and a shift towards more innovative economies.
