Intellectual Property Rights and Human Rights: Interconnected?

xxxx
Intellectual Property Rights and Human Rights: Interconnected?
xxxxxxxx
xxxxxx
2/15/2019

Introduction
Intellectual Property and Human Rights are the two bodies of law have become very commonly
used terms. In general Intellectual property rights means assigning general rights like copyrights,
patents and trademarks. By assigning these rights the creator or the innovator of a particular right
gets a monopoly over the product or service and disallows its duplicity or copy. In reality the
intellectual property system affects the enjoyment of different human rights (Lerner, 2010).
Intellectual Property right can be defined as a right that can be protected under the state or
Federal Law, including discoveries, copyrightable works, inventions, ideas and works.
Intellectual property is intangible in nature such as trade secrets, trademarks, copyrights and
patents (Lee & Ashgate., 2015). Although there is no direct relationship between intellectual
property and human rights as both of them evolved separately but there interconnections have
become very popular since last decade due to the following reasons: after the TRIPS Agreement
the impacts that intellectual property rights has on the human rights have become very visible
(Nosek, Borsboom, & Buck, 2015). Secondly, there are various challenges that are being faced
that concern the contributions of knowledge and the same cannot be covered under the present
regime of intellectual property rights. The importance of intellectual property rights has
increased and hence there is a lot of confusion between intellectual property rights and human
rights in the field of medical patents (Carrol, 2015).
Now, it is questionable that if an intellectual property right is a human right. One reason for this
is that the Intellectual Property Rights are protected by the private law while the public law
protects the human rights (Carlos, 2014). There are various treaties that protect the human rights
like WIPO Copyright Treaty, BC and PC. According to Section three of the general introduction
of professor Grosheide there is a legal literature between intellectual property and human rights
(Seyoum, 2014).
There is intersection of the human rights and the intellectual property rights due to TRIPS
agreement as well that was adopted in the year 1994 by the World Trade Organization. The
TRIPS agreement laid minimum standards for the protection of the Intellectual property.
According to Article 15(1) c there is imbalance between the intellectual property rights and the