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rade secrets trademarks, and other kind of rights that the law provides to protect investment in inventive attempt and knowledge creation. In contrast with knowledge, a tangible object can be utilized by others. As diffusion of new knowledge broadens, greater level of financial efficiency occurs. However, if new knowledge has no protection; inventors have little encouragement to invest resources to generate it. IPRs (temporarily) convert knowledge from a public commodity into a private one.

Through improved market power granted by the IPRs, owners of intellectual property can cover their expenditure in making new knowledge. Creative minds and innovative firms thus have an incentive to engage in creative actions. IPRs are thus a 'compromise between preserving the incentive to create knowledge and the desirability of disseminating knowledge at little or no cost' (World Bank, 1999, p. 33).

The 2 views about Intellectual Property Right (IPR)

IPR can be viewed in 2 different ways namely the Orthodox Perspective and the Heterodox Perspective

Orthodox Perspective

According to the orthodox perspective, when a creator creates a concept / idea, the act incurs development costs (laboratory cost, researchers’ fees, amongst others) and also runs the risk that the outcomes will not succeed. The orthodox perspective stipulates that if the creator is not entitled to compensation or reward on his/her creation, incentive for engaging in creative and innovative inventions would be non-existent. It is often seen that private markets do not frequently provide for compensation, which thus imply that innovative firms may not be willing to bear research and development cost for investigation of new ideas for products and taking them forward to be test marketed.

Heterodox Perspective

On the other hand, the heterodox perspective states that much knowledge is generated in public arena and even that which is not should not be monopolized. It supports the notion that ideas that can be owned are historically and geographically specific. According to this perspective, there is no need for intellectual property right because the main idea was already existent which therefore imply that no development cost was incurred.

Trade Related aspect of Intellectual Property (TRIPs)

The TRIPS Agreement is one of the 3 pillars of the WTO-the others being trade in goods (GATT) and trade in services (GATS). The TRIPS Agreement includes for the first time in any area of international law rules on domestic enforcement procedures and remedies. A major reason for placing IPRs in the WTO and for tying the three agreements together was to allow retaliation across agreements. Under this institutional arrangement, IPRs are subject to the binding dispute resolution procedure of WTO.

As a legally binding part of the WTO, the TRIPS Agreement provides minimum national standards for levels of protection to the creators of intellectual property. It covers: copyright and related rights, trademarks, geographical indications, industrial designs, patents (and plant variety protection), layout designs (topographies) of integrated circuits, protection of undisclosed information, and control of anti-competitive practices in contractual licenses (WTO legal texts pp.370-386).

WTO TRIPs Rule

In 1995, under the WTO rules, all mem