ABSTRACT
For over a century, the path for intellectual property (IP) law-making in the developing countries (DCs) has deviated from that normally attributed to sovereign nations. Instead of providing support for the national economy, political space and cultural and social life, IP law-making has become a means of appeasing powerful external pressures on those nations. The quest of the major industrial nations to open up world trade through numerous bilateral and multilateral treaties culminating in the Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1994 ended by imposing far-reaching IP laws on developing nations. However, that achievement has never fully satisfied the industrial powers, especially the US. The latter has continued to deploy additional devices to induce the DCs into further opening their domestic markets, principally for US goods and services but indirectly also for the industrial nations as a whole.
