CIPIL Seminar: 'International Trade and Intellectual Property Protection: Past, Present and Future'

Speaker: Thomas Cottier University of Bern

Location: B16

Abstract: The talk will deal with the fundamentals in the relation between Intellectual Property (IP) protection and international trade. With a focus on the multilateral system in the context of the World Trade Oraganization (WTO), it considers the idea of fair trade and what it means for protecting IP rights around the globe. This inevitably leads to a discussion of the origins and rationale of the WTO Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) in whose negotiations Thomas Cottier has been deeply involved. He examines how TRIPS has developed in the last 20 years - driven in particular by external influences. Using Competition Law as an example, Professor Cottier compares how issues affected by IP protection can be regulated within and outside TRIPS.

Speaker: Thomas Cottier is a Professor of European and International Economic Law at the University of Mern. He was the managing director of the World Trade Institute (WTI) from 2000-2014 and directed the national research programme on trade law and policy (NCCR Trade Regulation: From Fragmentation to Coherence), located at the WTI. He was educated at the University of Bern, University of Michigan Law School, and was a visiting fellow at Cambridge University, UK. He taught at the University of St. Gallen, Neuchatel and the Geneva Graduate Institute in Geneva and also regularly teaches at the Europa Institut Saarbrucken, Germany, Paris I (Sorbonne), Turin University, Italy and Wuhan University, China. He was a member of the Swiss National research Council from 1997 to 2004 and served on the Board of the International Plant Genetic resources Institute (IPGRI), Rome, during the same period. He served the Baker & McKenzie law firm of Counsel from 1998 to 2005.

Professor Cottier has a long-standing involvement in GATT/WTO activities. He served on the Swiss negotiating team of the Uruguay Round from 1986 to 1993, first as Chief negotiator on dispute settlement and subsidies for Switzerland and subsequently as Chief negotiator on TRIPs. He was the Deputy-Director General of the Swiss Intellectual Property Office and served as a member or chair of several GATT and WTO panels. Professor Cottier has written and publishes on a wide range of trade, European law and international law issues. His main research interests are in constitutional theory of multilevel governance and theory of international law, external relations of the EU, intellectual property, innovation and the challenges of climate change in international economic law.