Select a country below for links to the corresponding trade agreement and its intellectual property chapter.
USPTO attorneys have served as subject matter experts and negotiators for the intellectual property (IP) chapters of all U.S. trade agreements, working closely with the Office of the United States Trade Representative to ensure that our trading partners provide U.S. innovators and businesses with appropriate levels of protection for their IP rights. Using the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) as a baseline, the trade agreements establish norms consistent with U.S. law across all IP disciplines, to strike the proper balance of interests among IP owners, governments, and the public, while encouraging innovation, economic growth, and prosperity.
Although each the text of each agreement is different, reflecting circumstances particular to that negotiation, the IP chapters all generally contain provisions relating to patents and certain regulated products, trademarks and geographical indications, copyright and related rights, and IP enforcement. Below is a high-level summary of what is generally addressed in each subject matter area.
Summaries in each subject matter area
Patents and certain regulated products
- Provisions harmonizing aspects of substantive patent law that are key to obtaining and maintaining patent protection—for example, a 12-month grace period, sufficiency of disclosure, scope of patent eligibility, opportunities for amending or correcting a patent, and limitations on revocation or cancellation.
- Commitments to provide patent term adjustment to compensate for delays by the IP authority in granting the patent, and patent term extension to account for curtailment of effective patent term resulting from the regulatory approval process necessary to market certain products, such as pharmaceuticals and biologics.
- Periods of exclusivity for information submitted to regulatory authorities to obtain marketing approval for pharmaceuticals/biologics and agricultural chemicals, and permissions for third-party uses of patented inventions to facilitate early generic market entry (the so-called “Bolar provisions”).
- Limited derogations from exclusive rights—that is, conditions for compulsory licensing.
Trademarks and geographical indications
- Provisions ensuring transparency and due process with regard to the protection or recognition of geographical indications (GIs) through refusal or challenge on grounds that a GI is: (a) likely to cause confusion with a pre-existing trademark that acquired rights under the party’s law; (b) likely to cause confusion with a pre-existing good-faith pending trademark application or trademark registration in the party’s territory; or (c) is customary in common language as the common name for the relevant goods in the territory of the party.
- Provisions that require extending Paris Convention Article 6bis protection of well-known marks to goods or services that are not identical or similar to those identified by the well-known trademark, whether registered or not, provided that (a) use of that trademark in relation to those goods or services would indicate a connection between those goods or services and the owner of the trademark, and (b) the interests of the owner of the trademark are likely to be damaged by that use.
- Commitment to ensuring that a party’s trademark examination and registration system provides for: (a) issuing reasoned refusals when refusing registration of trademarks; (b) opportunities for applicants to respond to communications in writing; (c) the ability for applicants to contest initial refusals and make judicial appeals of any final refusals to register; and (d) opportunities for interested parties to challenge claimed rights to a trademark through opposition and/or cancellation procedures.
- Commitment preventing a party from requiring mandatory license recordals to establish the validity of licenses between parties or as a condition for allowing use of trademarks by licensees to constitute use by registrant-licensor.
- Commitment to facilitate efficiency and transparency for the filing and maintenance of trademarks and geographical indications by requiring electronic filing systems and online databases of pending applications and registered or otherwise recognized trademarks and geographical indications.
Copyright and related rights
- Obligations to provide holders of any economic rights in a work, performance, or phonogram the right to freely and separately transfer those rights via contract or license.
- Minimum terms of copyright protection, such as life of the author plus 70 years.
- Commitments to provide right holders with the exclusive right to authorize (or prohibit) making their work available to the public in such a way that members of the public may access the works from a place and at a time individually chosen by them.
- Provisions requiring the adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures, and adequate and effective legal remedies to protect rights management information.
IP enforcement
- Obligations to provide prompt, fair, and transparent enforcement procedures with reasoned decisions and published statistics, as well as simplified and expeditious judicial action, including availability of appropriate remedies.
- Provisions establishing ex officio authority with respect to imports, exports, and in‑transit goods, information-sharing with rightsholders and destruction of infringing goods.
- Provision of criminal penalties for willful counterfeiting and piracy on a commercial scale.
- Commitments regarding online and intermediary measures, including notice-and-takedown and repeat-infringer policies, mechanisms to obtain identifying information from service providers for alleged online infringers, and liability limitations for compliant providers.
- Protection for encrypted program‑carrying satellite signals against unauthorized reception and circumvention of conditional access or scrambling systems.