GATT and WTO

When a smartphone or a pair of jeans crosses a border, an importer pays a customs duty, and the exporter’s country watches whether its goods are treated as fairly as a rival’s. For decades the rules for this were written in a single agreement with a dull name, and run by a body that was never meant to be permanent. That agreement is GATT, its successor is the WTO, and TRIPS, the most important IP treaty, lives inside the WTO. To understand why IP law is tied to trade, you need to know how GATT became the WTO.

In two minutes

GATT (1947) was a multilateral agreement on tariffs and trade applied through successive negotiating rounds; the Uruguay Round (1986 to 1994) replaced it in practice with the World Trade Organization (from 1 January 1995), which administers trade agreements including TRIPS and settles disputes through a binding system.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Intellectual Property Laws on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.