Notifications under the TRIPS Agreement

The TRIPS Agreement obliges the WTO Members to make certain notifications to the Council for TRIPS. These notifications facilitate the Council's work of monitoring the operation of the Agreement and promote the transparency of Members' policies on intellectual property protection. In addition, Members wishing to avail themselves of certain possibilities provided in the Agreement that relate to the substantive obligations have to notify the Council. In order to implement these notification obligations, the Council has adopted procedures and guidelines relating to them. In addition, the Members have agreed to make certain notifications which are not regulated in the Agreement.

Information on notifications relating to technical cooperation can be found under Technical Cooperation in the TRIPS area.

Detailed information on the notification procedures can be found in the Technical Cooperation Handbook on Notification Requirements: Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights.

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Notifications under Article 63.2

Article 63.2 of the TRIPS Agreement requires Members to notify the laws and regulations made effective pertaining to the subject-matter of the Agreement (the availability, scope, acquisition, enforcement and prevention of the abuse of intellectual property rights). The procedures for the notification of national laws and regulations under Article 63.2 are contained in document IP/C/2. These procedures provide that, as of the time that a Member is obliged to start applying a provision of the TRIPS Agreement, the corresponding laws and regulations shall be notified without delay (normally within 30 days, except where otherwise provided by the TRIPS Council).

The procedures make a distinction between so-called “main dedicated intellectual property laws and regulations” and “other laws and regulations”. Document IP/C/2, paragraphs 6 and 9, and document IP/C/W/8 contain some guidelines for dividing the laws and regulations into these two categories. Main laws and regulations have to be notified in English, French or Spanish; other laws and regulations can be notified in a Member's national language even if this is not one of those three languages. Translations of laws and regulations must be accompanied by the authentic texts of the laws and regulations in question in a national language.

The national treatment and MFN obligations of Articles 3, 4 and 5 of the TRIPS Agreement became applicable to all Members from 1 January 1996, including those Members that avail themselves of the transitional periods provided in Articles 65.2 and 66.1 of the Agreement. The Council for TRIPS has recognized that Members have a number of options for meeting their obligation to notify those laws and regulations that correspond to the national treatment and MFN obligations of Articles 3, 4 and 5 of the Agreement. Further information on these options can be found in document IP/C/9.

Notifications of laws and regulations under Article 63.2 are distributed in the IP/N/1/ series of documents. The documentation of main dedicated intellectual property laws and regulations is distributed in the following sub-series of documents:

IP/N/1/-/C/* Copyright and Related Rights
IP/N/1/-/T/* Trademarks
IP/N/1/-/G/* Geographical Indications
IP/N/1/-/D/* Industrial Designs
IP/N/1/-/P/* Patents (Including Plant Variety Protection)
IP/N/1/-/L/* Layout-Designs (Topographies) of Integrated Circuits
IP/N/1/-/U/* Undisclosed Information
IP/N/1/-/I/* Industrial Property (General)
IP/N/1/-/E/* Enforcement
IP/N/1/-/O/* Other

The texts of the laws and regulations referred to in these documents are not contained in the WTO’s Documents Online database, since they have not generally been put into electronic form by the WTO Secretariat. However, as provided in Article 2(4) of the Agreement between the World Intellectual Property Organization and the World Trade Organization, the WTO Secretariat transmits to the International Bureau of WIPO a copy of the laws and regulations notified to the WTO Secretariat by WTO Members under Article 63.2 of the TRIPS Agreement in the language or languages and in the form or forms in which they were received, and the International Bureau places such copies in its paper collection. The World Intellectual Property Organization makes the laws and regulations contained in its collection available to the public in various ways, including by publishing them on-line in its Collection of Laws for Electronic Access (CLEA).

Given the difficulty of examining legislation relevant to many of the enforcement obligations in the TRIPS Agreement, Members have undertaken, in addition to notifying legislative texts, to provide information on how they are meeting these obligations by responding to a checklist of questions (document IP/C/5). Responses to these questions are circulated in the IP/N/6- series of documents.