Our first panel on the economics of IP here involved a friendly debate between Jiri Matolin, a Czech IP attorney, and Dr. Meir Pugatch of the University of Haifa, an afternoon panelist speaking during this session from the audience. The topic? The effectiveness/appropriateness of the TRIPs portion of WTO.

Matolin had made a compelling case for the post-TRIPs world, including the fact that there is for the first time a global IP settlement forum, the WTO, which supplants the pax Americana that had preceded WTO. He also said that developing countries had been "motivated" to join TRIPs in order to partake in all the benefits of WTO membership, acknowledging that entering states couldn't opt out of TRIPs.

Pugatch took issue with Matolin's "rosy" description. Developing countries wouldn't say they were motivated to join TRIPs, he said. They'd say they were "pushed, dragged." Pugatch said WTO was not in good shape, and said the dispute settlement body didn't have a great track record.

Matolin agreed with Pugatch to a point. "Some developing countries didn't want to adopt the TRIPs standard," he agreed. They believed it was only a device for Western countries to get more products into developing countries "and to an extend they were undoubtedly right," Matolin said. But he argued that those countries, had they not joined TRIPs, "wouldn't have attracted new innovations, new technologies... it really was a bargain, a quid pro quo.