INTRODUCTION

At its General Assembly in 2000, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) proposed the constitution of a special taskforce to look into intellectual property issues arising from the exploitation of genetic resources, traditional knowledge, and expressions of folklore at the request of its Member States. This resulted in the establishment of the Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore (IGC), which has spearheaded WIPO's exploratory efforts in shaping an international response to the misappropriation of these resources to develop products over which intellectual property rights are secured. Five years later, thousands of pages of text have been produced in a plethora of discussion materials, consultation papers, technical reports, survey result compilations, and numerous document drafts by the IGC and the WIPO Member States, which have responded to its calls for participation in the international process. Having held eight official sessions to analyse and discuss the intellectual property issues that have arisen in the context of these topical controversies, what progress has the IGC achieved in reaching a global consensus on the Intellectual Property community's response to these issues?

This chapter seeks to distil the output generated by the IGC and to evaluate the draft recommendations it has put forward in its recent sessions, identifying the key developments that have occurred at this forum and the directions in which they appear to be heading.

Overview: IP and competition laws within the Singapore legal framework

As a former British colony, Singapore's legal framework has been modelled closely after the common law and statutory instruments of the United Kingdom. The three primary intellectual property statutes in Singapore – concerned with copyright, patents and trade marks – bear a close resemblance to the corresponding UK statutes and their predecessors. Similarly, Singapore's recently-introduced competition law regime is based substantially on equivalent legislation from the UK which was, in turn, a codification of the European Community's competition law framework.

Despite the strong influence of UK laws on the domestic legislative framework which Singapore has enacted, a number of substantive modifications have been made by the legislature to further specific policy objectives which reflect domestic commercial and socio-economic conditions. Singapore has a small domestic market of less than 4 million consumers, but a relatively large, open and export-oriented economy. This chapter will highlight and discuss the various features of the Singapore legal framework which mediate between the frequently opposing goals of intellectual property law and competition law. Both these areas of law have evolved through, and continue to exist in, a state of flux as a result of Singapore's commitment to implement various international conventions and, more recently, to achieve compliance with its obligations under various free-trade agreements. Readers should therefore expect subsequent additions or changes to these two areas of law to continue beyond the publication date of this work.