The New Information Age and International Intellectual Property Law—Emerging and Recurring Issues for the Next Millennium

This paper examines the impact that globalization and technological advancements, particularly the Internet, have had on world intellectual property law, and will attempt to identify trends and developments for the future. As any good economist or stock market analyst will know, a review of the past and an examination of the present are not perfect indicants or predictors of the future, but together, if understood in proper context, they provide some of the best tools we have for divining the imminent and, perhaps, the inevitable. Accordingly, this paper will begin with an examination of the past and present developments in global intellectual property law, with particular emphasis placed on the Agreement on Trade‐Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (‘TRIPs’) and its requirements, loopholes, and ambiguities. Thereafter, a review of the stakeholders in the intellectual property debate, with special focus on the concerns and demands of developing countries, will take place. Finally, the effects of the collision of newly emerging, high‐tech information with the laggard paradigm of intellectual property law will summon forth some predictions on emerging legal and business issues. Oddly enough, these issues for the next century and beyond will be quite recognizable, even familiar, despite the rapid changes that have occurred with the technological revolution of the last quarter century. Indeed, they never die, but appear merely to be recast in different form. Moreover, the paper will conclude that these historic struggles will never cease, but must, by design, form the essential tensions that characterize intellectual property’s core basis.