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WTO/GATT Research: Citing the WTO agreements

• Selected books, databases & websites
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Bluebook citation of the WTO Agreements

To cite a multilateral convention, Rule 21.4.5(a)(ii) of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation , 20th ed., requires a U.S. source, if therein, with an optional parallel citation to a multilateral source. If neither of those can be obtained, Rule 21.4.5(c) requires a cite to I.L.M. or another unofficial source. Rule 21.11(d) has examples for some WTO and former GATT-era agreements. NOTE: Bluebook rules can change, so please check the latest edition at the time of your writing. 

The suggested citations below do not contain any U.S. treaty sources because the U.S. did not ratify the Uruguay Round agreements as treaties, but instead implemented them through legislation and administrative action. See Citing official U.S. sources . 

Instead, the citations below use U.N.T.S. and I.L.M. To locate U.N.T.S. see here and I.L.M. here . Unlike the United Nations, there is no separate GATT or WTO treaty series. In less recent publications, you may also see a citation to a WTO publication called  The Legal Texts: The Results of the Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations  (Cambridge, U.K.; New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, [2010] 1999)  Reserve K4600.A35 R473 2010 .  

SUGGESTED CITATIONS:

Final Act Embodying the Results of the Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations, Apr. 15, 1994, 1867 U.N.T.S. 14, 33 I.L.M. 1143 (1994) [hereinafter Final Act].

WTO Agreement: Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization, Apr. 15, 1994, 1867 U.N.T.S. 154, 33 I.L.M. 1144 (1994) [hereinafter Marrakesh Agreement or WTO Agreement].

GATT 1994:General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 1994, Apr. 15, 1994, Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization, Annex 1A, 1867 U.N.T.S. 187, 33 I.L.M. 1153 (1994) [hereinafter GATT 1994].

Agreement on Agriculture, Apr. 15, 1994, Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization, Annex 1A, 1867 U.N.T.S. 410. [Not reproduced in I.L.M.]

TRIMS Agreement: Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures, Apr. 15, 1994, Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization, Annex 1A, 1868 U.N.T.S. 186 [hereinafter TRIMS Agreement]. [Not reproduced in I.L.M.]

Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures, Apr. 15, 1994, Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization, Annex 1A, 1869 U.N.T.S. 14. [Not reproduced in I.L.M.]

GATS: General Agreement on Trade in Services, Apr. 15, 1994, Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization, Annex 1B, 1869 U.N.T.S. 183, 33 I.L.M. 1167 (1994) [hereinafter GATS].

TRIPS: Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, Apr. 15, 1994, Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization, Annex 1C, 1869 U.N.T.S. 299, 33 I.L.M. 1197 (1994) [hereinafter TRIPS Agreement].

DSU, Dispute Settlement Rules: Understanding on Rules and Procedures Governing the Settlement of Disputes, Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization, Annex 2, 1869 U.N.T.S. 401, 33 I.L.M. 1226 (1994) [hereinafter DSU]

U.S. sources for the WTO Agreements & the GATT 1947

See Citing official U.S. sources  in this guide. 

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Twenty-five years since TRIPS: Patent policy and international business

• Published: 12 October 2020
• Volume 3 , pages 315–328, ( 2020 )

Cite this article

• Suma Athreye 1 ,
• Lucia Piscitello 2 , 3 &
• Kenneth C. Shadlen 4  

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In this introduction to the special issue, we take stock of the impact of the TRIPS agreement on international business in the hyper-globalised world of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. We begin by providing a brief background on TRIPS, putting it in the historical context of international agreements on intellectual property (IP) and then looking at the logic of national patent policies, examining how policies may vary across countries, in theory, and reviewing literature that discusses the factors driving historical variation, in practice. We review the key issues in the domestic politics of implementation as the new rules migrate from the international to national levels. Lastly, we consider the implications of TRIPS for the governance of innovations in industries based on ICT and where ICT has enabled global value chains (GVCs), where the speed and distributed nature of innovation makes IPR simultaneously less effective and more necessary.

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Introduction

The Uruguay Round of trade negotiations, which began in 1986 and concluded in 1994 with the signing of the Marrakesh Agreement by all 123 negotiating countries, was notable for numerous reasons, including the formal integration of intellectual property rights into international trade rules. When the World Trade Organization (WTO) was launched in 1995, a product of the Uruguay Round, one of its main pillars would be the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).

TRIPS is not the first international agreement on intellectual property (IP); the Paris Convention (patents), Madrid System (trademarks), and Berne Convention (copyright) have existed since the late 1800s.Yet TRIPS can be understood as marking a fundamental break in a variety of ways. TRIPS is much deeper and more granular, placing external constraints on many more dimensions of national IP policy than previous agreements had. Beyond establishing shared commitments to basic principles, as previous international accords had done, TRIPS, in a detailed set of articles, includes specific prescriptions and proscriptions for national policy. 1 Notwithstanding its title, TRIPS addresses national IP measures regardless of whether these are “trade-related.” TRIPS is also stronger and more binding than previous agreements, as the costs of non-compliance are substantial. Because the inclusion of TRIPS in the WTO means that it is subject to the WTO’s dispute settlement system, which authorizes trade sanctions as a penalty against countries judged to be in violation of its rules, failure to abide by the rules can have economically painful consequences. The establishment of extensive and binding rules on national IP policy marks a shift from “international” to “global” IP governance (Maskus, 2014 ; Drahos, 1997 ) and, importantly, a major step toward global harmonization of national policies and practices for establishing and protecting intellectual property rights.

This Special Issue presents papers examining 25 years since TRIPS came into effect, in January 1995. In these two and a half decades, much has changed in the global innovation landscape. Technology trade has flourished and more technology has been transferred to subsidiaries by MNEs (Branstetter et al., 2006 ). Although IB theories emphasize the role of innovation and technological change in originating and strengthening the competitive advantages of the MNE, IB scholarship has focused mostly on considering IPR regulations as a location advantage/disadvantage (e.g., Ivus, Park & Saggi, 2017 ), or an institutional factor (e.g., Peng, Ahlstrom, Carraher, & Shi, 2017 ; Peng, 2013 ) interacting with MNE strategies. Through this Special Issue, our aim is to champion research analysing the contribution of IP harmonization to processes of technology transfer, policy-making, capability building and challenges to governance. Assessing the TRIPS experience to highlight what has worked well and what has not can offer new insights and lessons.

In this Introduction, we take stock of the impact of TRIPS on international business in the hyper-globalised world of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. We begin by providing a brief background on TRIPS, putting it in the historical context of international agreements on IP. We then look at the logic of national patent policies, examining how policies may vary across countries, in theory, and reviewing literature that discusses the factors driving historical variation, in practice. The following section discusses the international campaign that produced the TRIPS Agreement and considers key issues in the domestic politics of implementation as the new rules migrate from the international to national levels. We then look more closely at the implications of TRIPS for industries based on ICTs and where governance of GVCs feature prominently. The final section introduces the papers in the Special Issue, placing each of them in the broader debates and themes discussed in this Introduction.

A Brief Primer on TRIPS

One of the remarkable aspects of TRIPS is how it expanded over time during the course of the Uruguay Round. 2 What was originally advanced as a global accord against counterfeiting after years of negotiation ended up being a comprehensive agreement covering a wide range of IP policies. As the content expanded, the axes of political conflict shifted as well. Although, at the time of the Uruguay Round’s launch, divisions over whether to include IP on the agenda were largely of a “North-South” nature, once this hurdle was cleared, subsequent negotiations on substantive issues revealed “North-North” divisions as well.

This dynamic was notable, for instance, in the area of IP for pharmaceuticals. Many developing countries tried to block the inclusion of IP on the Uruguay Round negotiating agenda, maintaining that IP and trade rules should be kept separate, and having failed to keep IP off the agenda they mobilized their efforts to resist the inclusion of the provision that would require countries to allow patents on pharmaceuticals products. After all, prior to the 1990s, few developing countries did so. Though developing countries lost this fight too, 3 the specifics of this requirement (for example, transition periods and whether this should be done retroactively), and more generally the rules about how countries should treat IP in pharmaceuticals, were produced by extensive negotiations and compromise, not only between North and South, the original antagonists, but also among countries in the North. Most European countries, for example, had only recently (since the late 1970s) begun to allow patents on pharmaceuticals, and they too were grappling with the consequences of this change and were resistant to some of the proposals made by countries where pharmaceutical patenting was longer established (Taubmann & Watal, 2015 ; Reichman, 2009 ; Matthews, 2002 ).

As much as the content of TRIPS expanded during the Uruguay Round, the world’s changes outpaced it. The establishment of the European Common Market in 1993 altered (or reflected on-going shifts in) the political and economic strategies of many European countries, and the balance of power within international organizations. The collapse of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (as well as that of Yugoslavia), and thus the end of communism and state-planning in most of Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe, meant that a large group of additional countries would now seek to attract foreign investment, participate in international trade, and, more generally, integrate into the global economy. 4 At the same time, many developing countries abandoned industrial planning and policies of import-substituting industrialization, reduced barriers to imports and foreign investment, and also sought greater integration into the global economy. And, of course, China, the world’s most populous country, also underwent a major reorientation of economic strategy in this period; though not a participant in the Uruguay Round negotiations, by the time the WTO was launched in 1995, China, which eventually became a WTO member in 2001, was already emerging as an industrial powerhouse.

The worlds of business and technology were also markedly different by the end of the Uruguay Round than they had been at the start. The spread of new technologies of ICT began to gather steam and ultimately ushered in a new phase in the development of industry and global production largely dominated by increasing fragmentation of production and global value chains (GVCs). For the leading industrial countries strident in their demand for stricter IP protection, the TRIPS provisions had few safeguards for the new technology sectors that were emerging, such as software, AI, and telecommunications. Patent and copyright policies towards the new ICT industries, and their relation to competition policy, remain contentious areas where consensus has yet to evolve. In some sectors marked by globalization of production and the presence of GVCs, TRIPS has been almost redundant and supplanted by standards and cooperative agreements over essential patents as the mode of governance of innovation and appropriability. The emergence of digital commerce created new challenges and forms of conflict that TRIPS was unable to address (Azmeh, Foster, & Echavarri, 2020 ; Haggart, 2014 ). International labour mobility has also brought a slew of new issues to consider such as trade secrets and espionage activity. Thus TRIPS, though the most comprehensive international IP agreement, was in some ways born outdated, having to cope with new realities that were unforeseen at the start of – and even during most of – the Uruguay Round.

National Patent Policies in Theory and Practice

Standard economic theory as outlined in Scotchmer ( 2004 ) argues that optimal (patent) incentive polices will differ when we consider the national or international context. In a domestic context, the optimal patent policy tries to balance benefits that accrue to consumers and producers, mainly by addressing the question: how much monopoly profit should the innovator be allowed in order to maximise the social welfare that society as a whole may derive from a new invention? Phrasing the question in this way recognises that pricing under patenting will be higher due to the implicit monopoly granted by the patent and as such will produce a deadweight loss to society as a whole because of the restriction of output and the higher price borne by consumers (Nordhaus, 1969 ). As a consequence, economic thinking about patents is also dominated by market share arguments and the societal lack of welfare due to the monopoly granted by patents. Indeed, economic theory since Schumpeter has long recognized that patents (and IP protection, more generally) can have both dynamic effects, by creating incentives for innovation, and static and deadweight losses, by allowing patent-owners to charge monopoly prices. The optimal patent policy tries to balance these two effects, and thus the benefits that accrue to producers of innovations and users of innovations. 5

In establishing national patent systems, three levers are available to the government to strike this delicate balance between producer and social welfare interests. These are the scope of patentability, which defines the boundaries of what types of knowledge are eligible for private ownership; the exemptions to property rights, which define the relative rights of owners versus users; and the duration of patents, which establishes the time when privately owned knowledge enters the public domain. 6 In the paragraphs that follow we briefly discuss each of the three levers, though before doing so it is worth noting simply that the first lever, which affects the establishment of the IPR, is the most important of the three in a gatekeeper sense, as the abilities of owners to exercise such rights and how long they may do so are relevant only in the context of there being a property right.

Regarding “scope,” patents are available for inventions and not available for products of nature, but countries may differ in their determinations of what knowledge fits within each of these categories. More concretely (and less philosophically), countries may declare that certain types of knowledge, even if “inventions,” are nevertheless ineligible for patent protection. As noted above, the area of pharmaceuticals provides an example: new molecules and compounds are “inventions,” but until the late 1970s only a handful of countries allowed pharmaceutical products to obtain patents (Liu & LaCroix, 2015 ; Shadlen, Sampat, & Kapczynski, 2020 ).

Related to the scope of patentability is the “breadth” of patents, which regards the number and type of claims that are allowed. Broad patents allow the producer to profit from subtle product differentiation and make it more difficult for potential competitors to “invent around the patent” and enter the market upon achieving such differentiation (Merges & Nelson, 1990 ). Until the late 1980s Japan stood out among advanced economies for having a patent system that imposed narrow breadth, restricting patents on a single claim (Ordover, 1991 ). For the most part, patent breadth is determined through office practices and jurisprudence, and not a matter of policy per se.

A second lever concerns exemptions to patent rights. With intellectual property, which is based on non-rivalrous material, consumers and other producers beyond the owners (i.e., “third parties”) typically are allowed more rights to use the privately-owned knowledge than is the case with ordinary property. Patent systems will always have provisions that set out and delimit such rights. Some of these will be established as automatic exemptions that do not depend on permission from the rights-holder or the State, such as research use, or preparing products for commercial launch upon expiration of the patent. Other exemptions, which are non-automatic, require the State to grant permission to private or public actors to use patented knowledge without the owner’s consent, as is the case with a compulsory license. Although pharmaceuticals is the area where we observe the most amount of action with regard to compulsory licensing, as discussed by Ramani and Urias in this SI, other sectors where such exemptions play an important part include semiconductors (chip manufacturers need to experiment with various chips to create their own) and seed producers (they need to experiment with seeds in order to create new hybrids). 7

The final lever of national policies, the duration of patents, is also the clearest: longer-lasting patents allow producers to charge monopoly prices (and thus earn greater profits) for a longer time, while consumers in the economy pay higher prices for longer periods of time. Note, however, that in sectors with rapid technological change, the length of the patent is less consequential than it might seem if inventions become obsolete well before their patents expire.

The discussion of the three levers allows us to conclude that countries’ IP systems afford “stronger” protection when they allow more types of knowledge to be patented, the exemptions to owners’ private rights of exclusion are fewer, and they last longer. Indeed, we could, at least theoretically (subject to data constraints), use these dimensions to compare the strength of all countries’ patent systems across time and space. 8

Having explained how patent policies may differ in theory, the next question is what factors account for variation in practice. Scholars have argued that IP institutions are endogenous to the growth process and acquire prominence with the growth of technological capacity, and strong IPR in earlier stages of development can prove to be barriers to the development of technological capability and innovation, rather than act as incentives. As countries acquire more innovative capabilities and their scientific and industrial sectors expand, and as their firms move closer to the technological frontier, the case for stronger IP protection often follows (Sweet & Eterovic, 2019 ; Sweet & Maggio, 2015 ; Kalaycı & Pamukçu, 2014 ; Acemoglu, Aghion, & Zilibotti, 2006 ).

Accordingly, a substantial body of research has shown that countries’ choices of how strong to set the level of protection in their IP systems have, historically, been a function of domestic conditions, such as levels of income, industrial structure, and scientific-technological capabilities. In general, countries seeking to catch-up with wealthier and more technologically advanced countries tended to offer weaker IP protection to facilitate the use of foreign knowledge and information, and subsequent strengthening of IP tended to reflect changes in these same characteristics. Indeed, the close relationship between national conditions and IP policies has long been demonstrated (Chen & Puttitanun, 2005 ; Lerner, 2000 ; LaCroix & Liu, 2009 ; Maskus, 2000 , 2012 ; May & Sell, 2006 ). The Netherlands and Switzerland had no patent systems in the 19 th and much of the 20 th centuries (Schiff, 1971 ); the German patent system was only established in 1870. And even as countries had patent systems, some areas of knowledge remained off limits, and the rights of exclusion were moderated. In the USA, although a patent system to protect inventions was mandated in the first article of the constitution, throughout much of the 19 th century, protection for inventions originating abroad remained weak (Peng et al., 2017 ; Mowery, 2010 ; Khan, 2005 ). 9 As noted, not until the late 1980s did Japan offer stronger patent protection, rather it was designed to maximize the diffusion of knowledge and maximize opportunities for local actors to develop technological capabilities (Ordover, 1991 ). For many late-developing countries, IP policies featuring weak patent protection were fundamental to their industrialization strategies (Kim et al., 2012 ; Odagiri, Goto, Sunami, & Nelson, 2010 ; Kumar, 2002 ).

This scenario of national variation in patent policies was a function of a permissive international environment. That is, prior to TRIPS, international rules were based on the principle that different approaches to IP made sense in different countries depending on national conditions. Indeed, international rules on patents, which established a framework for an international patent system (e.g., rules on priority dates) but imposed few substantive obligations on countries, explicitly accommodated cross-national diversity. In the next section, again focusing on patents, we explain the major shift in global governance, from the Paris Convention to TRIPS.

The International Political Economy of Harmonization: From Paris Convention to TRIPS

The most important provision of the Paris Convention regards “national treatment,” which requires countries to afford foreign inventors the same opportunities and rights as those available to national inventors. But this is extremely limited. National treatment equalizes treatment at whatever level the country chooses, but it does not address the level of treatment. That is, in the language of the three levers of policy discussed above, national treatment does not say that countries should allow patents over given types of knowledge, or limit exemptions in particular ways, or have longer-lasting patents, but rather that if they do grant patents in particular technological classes, with particular rights of exclusion attached for a given period of time, they must treat foreign inventors the same as they treat national inventors. If a country does not offer strong patent protection, national treatment simply means that no one receives strong patent protection in that country.

From the perspective of firms in information- and knowledge-intensive industries which sought stronger protection on a global scale, the Paris Convention was clearly inadequate. They wanted to raise the bar across the globe, establishing international arrangements that would encourage harmonization at a higher level of IP protection. Starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s, these firms, both on their own and through their sectoral associations, mobilized intensively in the US and Europe to create a new international arrangement, with the key step being to link IP rules to international trade (Sell, 2003 , 2010 ; Ryan, 1998 ; Drahos, 1995 ). In doing so, they made achieving stronger IP protection a key feature of American and European foreign economic policy in this period.

The USA first linked IP practices to trade in 1984, with a reform of the Trade Act that defined “unfair” trade to include IP practices that did not meet US standards. The punishments attached to transgressions could range from trade sanctions imposed under Section 301 to withdrawal of preferential market access provided by the General System of Preferences. Then, in 1988, just as the Uruguay Round discussions on IP were picking up pace, the US Trade Act underwent a further amendment, this time creating a new mechanism that was specifically about IP. Starting in 1989, the United States Trade Representative (USTR) began issuing an annual “Special 301” Report, essentially a global report card that evaluated all countries’ IP practices and placed those judged to be problematic on the “Watch List” or “Priority Watch List.” As countries were placed on the Watch List and then escalated to the Priority Watch List, the threat of penalties increased, and when a country was identified as a “Priority Foreign Country,” the USTR was obligated to initiate proceedings to apply sanctions. 10

Not surprisingly, many countries that were most resistant to IP negotiations in the Uruguay Round were targeted directly by the USTR. Unilateral pressures of this sort not only brought many hesitant countries to the negotiating table, but made agreement on a multilateral set of rules more attractive too (Odell, 2006 ; Drahos, 1995 ; Bayard & Elliott, 1994 ; Bhagwati & Patrick, 1990 ). When the WTO was launched in 1995, the agreement on IP, TRIPS, was included.

TRIPS took international IP rules to an entirely new level, by calling for harmonization at a level closer to what was available in wealthier countries. 11 Its aims extended far beyond reciprocal national treatment of foreign inventions to the harmonization and strengthening of IP systems in the world. In the quest for stronger protection, TRIPS addressed each of the levers of national policy. It called for wider scope, requiring patents to be granted in all fields of technology; it tried to restrict the range of allowable exemptions to patent rights; and it established longer terms for patents, requiring terms of 20 years from the date of application.

This new approach to IP did not respect where particular countries were in their national evolution, but sought to construct a uniform system of protection that could support a global market for trade in technology goods. Low and middle-income countries who were net buyers of technology, were fearful that stronger protection at home would increase profit flows to foreigners. International profit flows depended upon the relative size of domestic markets and the relative sizes of country innovative capacities. Thus, countries with smaller national markets and countries with stronger innovative capacities (most high-income countries) generally favoured stronger protection, but countries with larger markets and weak innovative capacities resisted. Middle and Low-income countries who opposed TRIPS were in the latter group.

It is important to underscore that the WTO was concluded as a “single undertaking,” meaning that all members were subject to all of its agreements. As a result, even countries that resisted TRIPS ended up as parties to – and bound by – it. Thus, once the Uruguay Round was concluded and the new WTO’s rules came into effect in 1995, countries began revising their national laws to come into conformity with TRIPS (and other WTO agreements). In other words, WTO member states moved from a period of TRIPS negotiation to TRIPS implementation (Shadlen, 2017 ; Deere, 2008 ). In this context, with participation in the international trading system conditioned on being in compliance with TRIPS, the question that countries faced was not if but how they would comply with the new international agreement.

Although TRIPS established harmonization, it did not create a world of uniform patent policies and levels of patent protection. That is, a set of countries could all be in compliance with TRIPS yet all demonstrate differences in the details of their national IP systems. The reasons for this are twofold. First, TRIPS is not a self-executing body of law, but rather an agreement that prescribes and proscribes different practices, leaving matters of implementation to countries. For example, TRIPS establishes a set of conditions that should be met in granting compulsory licenses, but how these conditions are operationalized in national patent systems (What sort of behaviour by patent owners constitute grounds for compulsory licenses? Can the Ministry of Health act on its own? Does there need to be a health emergency, and, if so, how is it determined and who declares it?) was left to be determined locally. This means that TRIPS left countries with policy options (Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, 2002 ; Correa, 2000 ), and countries could – and did – comply with TRIPS differently. Second, TRIPS for the most part addressed laws, not so much enforcement practices. That means that not only may countries differ de jure (e.g., the three policy levers, or the details of the compulsory licensing rules), but also de facto due to the enforcement of their new laws. And evidence suggests substantial gaps between de jure and de facto levels of IP protection (Maskus, 2000 ; Shadlen, Schrank, & Kurtz, 2005 ). One recent study (Papageorgiadis & McDonald, 2019 ) shows that de jure IP protection departs significantly from the de facto IP protection for several middle- and low-income countries. Figure  1 is from their paper and shows the two dimensions of de jure and de facto IPR on the two axes. 12

Country plot of 48 patent systems in the post-TRIPS year 2005 using the annual scores of two indices of patent law on the books and patent law in practice. Source: Papageorgiadis and McDonald ( 2019 ), Figure  2 .

Although attention on lax enforcement has often focussed on China, China is not alone. Figure  1 reveals similar gaps between laws on the books and laws in practice in many other emerging economies, such as Argentina, Mexico, the Philippines, and Turkey, as well as India, Russia and Brazil (many of these countries initially opposed the TRIPS agreement). Indeed, as pointed out in Athreye, Martelli and Piscitello ( 2020 ), one can discern two groups of countries – those for whom de jure and de facto IPR move in the same direction (a positive relation) and a smaller group of middle income countries for whom the two are compensatory (a negative relation). 13

As we examine the dynamics of TRIPS implementation at the national level, both introducing and enforcing new laws, it is worth underscoring how the new international agreement altered the nature of domestic politics by imbuing technology-intensive sectors with new authority and importance. This happened in much the same way as Baldwin ( 2016 ) argues the reciprocity principle in GATT helped shift political interests to create a juggernaut of tariff cutting behaviour across nations. Prior to TRIPS, national patent policies were shaped largely by strong consumer groups and import substituting industrial sectors. Innovators (actual, fledgling, and aspiring) rarely had large and direct say in the drawing up of national IP policies, which in many developing countries were not designed to encourage innovation so much as to assure that knowledge, information, and technologically-intensive goods were accessible to consumers and as inputs to local industry. By forcing shifts in national policies toward stronger IP protections, TRIPS served as an exogenous shock that changed the distribution of incomes between innovative and non-innovative business groups. 14 Once stronger IP protection was implemented, innovative businesses/sectors gained from the new arrangements while businesses that relied on the previous arrangements experienced shrinking margins and some even left non-innovative lines of business. This changed the balance of political power with the two groups in ways that became self-reinforcing, as in subsequent political conflicts over IP, it was now the more innovation-focused sets of actors in business (and also within the state) that hold the upper hand. And the preferences of actors changed too. Faced with a new status quo , some actors that opposed TRIPS adjusted to the new environment and began to see opportunities where they previously felt only threats. When this happened, they revised their political strategies and were likely to seek alliances with actors that had supported the introduction of new arrangements (Sinha, 2016 ; Shadlen, 2011 ).

New Technologies of ICT, GVC Governance and TRIPS

In the spectrum of goods to which the provision of TRIPS could apply, scholarly attention has focussed sharply on goods with externalities, such as access to medicines and climate change technologies where the stronger monopoly enabled by TRIPS was obviously to the detriment of many poorer nations and poor consumer in richer nations. The adoption of TRIPS, however, came before the full impact of the newly emerging ICTs was felt. Consequently, the ICT sectors themselves and the ICT-mediated global value chains faced challenging governance issues shaped by the uncertainty of IP rights and in some cases, these were sorted out through sectoral innovations in the governance of IP rights.

Improvements in ICTs and rapid globalisation created unprecedented opportunities for the fragmentation of global value chains by reducing the transaction costs of exchanging information and communication across different stages of production. The best example of the changing industrial organization of production is the car industry, which moved from being a monolithic Fordist assembly line to gradual vertical disintegration along component lines. Today the car we drive has engine and components sourced from different parts of the world and includes improvements due to R&D conducted in different countries. Ghemawat ( 2007 ) ascribes this development to the globalization of markets being accompanied by the globalization of production. Thus, in many sectors of industrial activity, firms today select the best location for every value chain activity, either at home or abroad, and whether inside or outside organizational boundaries (Alcacer, Cantwell, & Piscitello, 2016 ).

As ICTs allow higher-quality information to be more readily accessed through a greater diversity of potential channels (Rangan & Sengul, 2009 ); market-based transactions and outsourcing are favoured and the use of ICT tends to reduce the extent to which facilities are owned by the MNE (Zaheer & Manrakhan, 2001 ). Thanks to IT-enabled integration capabilities, the fragmentation of processes across units allows firms to exploit complementarities between dispersed fragments, to vary their information-protection approach according to the specific institutional context of each host country, and to (selectively) develop a differentiated use of internal controls over activities performed abroad (Gooris & Peeters, 2016 ). On the other hand, better quality of IPR institutions in host countries facilitates intra-firm knowledge transmission by MNEs to their affiliates (Branstetter et al., 2006 ), and shifts the organisational mode towards outsourcing by reducing the need for integration to hedge against knowledge dissipation and opportunistic behaviour by the supplier/local unit.

One important consequence of the new possibilities opened up by GVCs is that attention has shifted from market share arguments (based on the economic efficiency of IP policies) toward property-based arguments that highlight the role of IP in facilitating technology trade and the emergence of disintegrated, specialized technology markets (Spulber, 2021 ; Barnett, 2011 ; Arora, Fosfuri & Gambardella, 2001 ; Athreye, 1997 ). The greater is the use of specialized markets, the greater the need for IP to enable transactions across them. This is shown in Figure  2 , adapted from Barnett ( 2011 ), which illustrates the different IP requirements of the integrated and disintegrated industrial organization models. The first model in Figure  2 represents the classical case of R&D-based innovation to produce a technology product (as in the case of big pharma). But the next two models represent different realities of subcontracting and vertically disintegrated supply chain models, with the second and the third being representations of sectors like Semiconductors or the new Biopharma. What is interesting is the more IP-intensive nature of the second and third models shown by the shaded boxes, which involve IP-based technology transfer activities. The more points at which IP transactions occur as technology is handed over for further processing to create the final product, the more patent-intensive is the final product. Having patents protecting these stages reduces transactions costs. The higher the division of labour in R&D, the more the scope for such IP transactions. However, this IP is for the most part protecting very small market shares as each stage involves a number of different operators.

Use of IP in integrated and disintegrated supply chains. Source By authors, based on Figure 4 in Barnett ( 2011 : 821)

ICTs, due to the higher use of patents in more fragmented value chains, increased the scope for TRIPS-like provisions. This is the case even in those sectors like telecommunications where it is not immediately obvious that patents are always the most effective means for protection as technology is changing so rapidly. Widespread patent ownership created other issues – such as the difficulty of new innovations in the presence of fragmented patent ownership (patent thickets) and blockage to innovation that is cumulative. In these instances, sectors have come up with their own institutional innovations such as patent pooling to permit cross –licensing of fragmented patent ownership into a single contract in ICT and the use of Fair, Reasonable, and Non-discriminatory licensing of essential patents (FRAND) to allow scaled up manufacturing in telecommunications. The effect of these institutional innovations in the governance of IP on globalization of R&D and production is sadly an understudied but important subject.

Although Figure  2 does not distinguish between domestic and foreign operations, we can speculate that MNEs’ strategic choices also influenced the effects and trajectories of IP policies in different countries (Bessen & Meurer, 2008 ). The global fragmentation of value chains is associated with multidirectional flows of information and knowledge across the entities involved in the international network of MNEs (Markus, Sia, & Soh, 2012 ) and weak IPR protection increases the risk of information leakage and misappropriation (e.g., Martinez-Noya & Garcia-Canal, 2011 ). Successful GVC integration requires a dense circulation of information flows to communicate specifications, standards and technical know-how in addition to costs and other items (Gereffi, Humphrey, & Sturgeon, 2005 ). Within this context, lead firms need to weigh the advantages of disaggregating the production process and the cost reduction this can bring against the risk of losing control over some of their proprietary intangible assets. Thus, lead firms engaged in GVC trade are interested in stricter IPRs in trade agreements to contain the risk of IP appropriation resulting from the international fragmentation of production. However, in order to circumvent the difficulty of using formal IP protection channels and to find other ways to enforce IPRs without limiting the scope of GVC activity, other mechanisms for the management of IP are increasingly emerging, mainly based on the attempt to move beyond legal procedures. Strategies such as a finer slicing of the processes (Gooris & Peters, 2016 ), or a sort of holistic approach using Corporate Social Responsibility to enforce stricter IPR standards along the chains (Gillai, Rammohan, & Lee, 2014 ), or the actions aiming at fostering “a culture of IP protection and compliance” throughout the global supply chain are all becoming mainstream (WIPO, 2017 ).

On the flip side, many middle-income countries that aspired to move up the technological ladder and build their own domestic capabilities, could see a new path to growth through participation in GVCs if they were willing to embrace the tougher IP demands in TRIPS. For example, as MNEs became willing to locate their production in different countries, industrialists in these countries (hoping to become part of a global value chain) were also willing to conform to the IP standards required by the MNE – often with more stringent enforcement (Brandl et al., 2019 ). In fact, the tightening of IP regulations and the deeper integration between countries through regulatory standards convergence (Rodrik, 2018 ) goes in parallel with the expansion of GVC trade (Timmer et al., 2014 ). This has led authors like Chang ( 2002 ) to protest that the stronger and better institutions for development demanded of developing countries today was not fair but an attempt to “kick away the ladder” to prevent developing countries from joining the elite club of developed nations. However, China’s rise shows us that if the government/firms were prepared to make the R&D investments, then strong IP need not be a deterrent to technological growth in lower income countries. Indeed, China’s rapid growth today and the effect of its prosperity on the growth of other Middle and Low-income countries is testament to the success of such strategies, although as Gomory and Baumol ( 2001 ) predict, such a strategy can create conflicts when the incumbent countries feel that their market share is threatened.

The growing role of intangible assets (technology, design and branding) in production is increasingly reflected in the growing share of intangible assets in the value of final products in international trade (Durand & Milberg, 2020 ; WIPO, 2017 ; Timmer et al., 2016 ). Hsieh and Rossi-Hansberg ( 2020 ) attribute this to a second industrial revolution in services sectors due to which productivity in services has been raised by ICTs in a manner similar to what machines and mechanical engineering did during the first industrial revolution. Furthermore, lead firms in GVCs are increasingly focussing on the intangibles, while outsourcing the tangibles to their partners in Middle and Low-income countries. As a consequence, more protection of intangibles is being demanded under the ambit of TRIPS such as protection for data, trademarks and copyrights. Sectors that have greater intangible capital – whether because of technological knowledge or consumer goodwill (brands) – are also able to earn more by judiciously choosing their location strategies.

Twenty-Five Years of TRIPS: Scope of the Special Issue Papers

There is a growing recognition in the IB literature that institutions are not always exogenous and instead co-evolve with firms: as the behaviour of firms starts changing, institutions start adapting as well (Athreye, 2020 ; Cantwell, Dunning, & Lundan, 2010 ; Peng et al., 2017 ). However, the imposition of TRIPS and the acceptance of seemingly stringent agreements and the shift to stronger IP for Middle and Low-income countries was exogenously driven. Once the status quo changed and the new institutions were in place, actors did change their strategies and new political possibilities emerged (as was discussed earlier).

The papers in this special issue in one way or another describe the various strategies used to drive policy in the national implementation stage of the TRIPS agreement. One way in which a more nuanced use of harmonised IPR could emerge is through the drafting of more detailed IP chapters in Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) between countries. The paper by Christoph Mödlhamer argues that the innovative capacity of states that are members of a preferential agreement shapes demand for IPRs in the PTA. Innovative economies that rely on IP generation favour IPRs because IP-reliant industries press for IPR inclusion when governments negotiate PTAs with less innovative economies. By contrast, PTAs between non-innovators remain sparse in IPR provisions because few industries on either side demand IPR. Analyzing novel data on IPR provisions in 495 PTAs signed between 1988 and 2018, he shows that heterogeneity in PTA members’ innovativeness indeed increases the inclusion of IPR clauses in PTAs. His findings help to understand preferences towards IPRs in PTA negotiations and shed light on reasons for varying numbers of IPR inclusions, while offering a refinement of the conventional wisdom that adds to our understanding of PTA design.

In general, these findings on IP chapters of PTAs are consistent with Gamso and Grosse ( 2020 ). They find that deep PTAs with provisions such as investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms and property rights protections provide signals that are especially important to investors in countries where property rights are weak, as the extra protections provided by a deeper agreement can substitute for those that are missing at the domestic level. Empirically, they find that PTA depth is positively associated with FDI between member countries, but the association weakens as property rights laws in host countries increase in strength. Thus, they conclude that governments can attract higher levels of FDI through comprehensive trade agreements, as opposed to shallow PTAs, when domestic policies are not sufficient. However, shallow agreements suffice where domestic policy already protects property rights.

For many countries, another obvious way to prioritize national interest is to weaken the ‘national treatment’ principle in enforcement. A growing body of work has demonstrated anti-foreign bias in patent grants by offices around the world such as the JPO (Helfgott, 1990 ), EPO (Kotabe, 1992 ) and SIPO (Brander, Cui & Vertinsky, 2017 ). Though most of this evidence shows correlation rather than causation, if true it is a repudiation of the ‘national treatment’ principle, which as we noted earlier was a central pillar of the Paris Convention and TRIPS.

The paper by Rassenfosse and Hosseini, using data for the USPTO, shows that inventions of foreign origin are about ten percentage points less likely to be granted a patent than domestic inventions, which suggests discrimination against foreigners. Why does such discrimination exist? They distinguish between intentional and unintentional discrimination. Intentional discrimination relates to disparate treatment of a specific group of applicants, whereas unintentional discrimination arises when policies, practices, and rules have disparate impacts on a specific group of applicants. Their analysis shows that the bias against foreigners is largely the result of unintentional discrimination and can be explained by differences in patent agents used by foreigners and locals, the financial resources of the applicants, and the level of effort that applicants put into the prosecution process. Thus, the story they tell is about disparate impact (due to better financial resources) rather than disparate treatment.

The paper by Petit, van Pottelsberghe de la Potterie and Gimeno-Fabra disagrees with the results presented by Rassenfosse and Hosseini and argues that tests of the national treatment argument should be conducted not on grant rates (which may be influenced by more adverse market conditions facing the foreign applicant) but on the examination process. The examination process is defined as the work carried out by the patent examination office (to assess if an application fulfils the legal patentability conditions), which is assumed to be (mostly) independent from economic forces. Testing for national bias within the examination process relies on the fact that patent offices are legally required to justify each decision they publish through concrete and transparent evidence. As a result, discriminatory behaviours from patent offices should show up in the way applications are processed. Using this alternative empirical approach to test for national bias at the EPO, the JPO, and the USPTO, and through a unique database that quantifies the key patent examination processes and find no evidence of national bias throughout the work of three patent offices (WIPO, EPO and USPTO). 15

The paper by Ramani and Urias reviews the use of the much-publicized TRIPS flexibility – compulsory licensing for public health – in middle and low-income countries. Compulsory licensing is considered an important policy instrument to make medicines affordable in countries where a pharmaceutical industry does not exist or where stronger TRIPS provisions on product patents are likely to increase the prices of medicines placing then out of the reach of a large segment of the population in many low and middle income countries. Based on a systematic review of the existing evidence on the impact of compulsory licensing on drug prices, Ramani and Urias identify 24 instances of compulsory licensing in 8 countries – which is a very limited use of this much touted flexibility. They attribute this limited use to the very restrictive scope for the use of compulsory licensing in the TRIPS provisions.

Comparing pre- and post-compulsory licensing prices, their paper finds that a compulsory licensing event is likely to reduce the price of a patented drug, although public knowledge of the extent of price drop is poor. Further, they find compulsory licensing procurement from the international market is likely to be more effective in reducing drug prices than contracts to local companies. Interestingly, their findings are reconfirmed in the race to improve access to the antiviral medication Remdesivir for hospitalized COVID-19 patients, based on information that is publicly available. Clearly, the future incidence and impact of compulsory licensing will depend on further possible procedural refinements to ease its implementation, the development of technological and manufacturing capabilities in developing countries, and the importance of biologics among life-saving drugs. COVID-19 could prove a pivotal moment in redefining this flexibility and enabling its wider use.

Finally, Abinader’s in-depth analysis of pharmaceutical patenting in the Dominican Republic, a country that does not ordinarily receive much attention in the literature on IP, sheds light on what conformity with TRIPS looks like in practice. The paper allows us to observe patent prosecution in a developing country where substantive examination is new. The finding of low grant rates, not just for more questionable “secondary” patents but also for “primary” patents covering active ingredients suggests that, TRIPS-driven harmonization notwithstanding, domestic politics and state institutions continue to cast a substantial influence over de facto levels of patent protection.

Although the papers in this issue do not cover all aspects of international business since TRIPS, we hope some of the issues noted in this Introduction and in the included papers will create a rich menu of future options for research on TRIPS and patent policy by IB scholars.

TRIPS is also wider in that it covers more areas of IP. In addition to patents, trademarks, and copyright, TRIPS also addresses geographical indications, industrial designs, integrated circuits, and plant varieties.

Watal and Taubam ( 2015 ) provide a fascinating account of the process of negotiation and its twists and turns.

TRIPS Article 27, on “Patentable Subject Matter,” in its first paragraph states that “patents shall be available for any inventions, whether products or processes, in all fields of technology….”

Many of the post-communist countries eventually joined the European Union, contributing to its expansion from 15, at the time the WTO was founded, to 28 by the mid-2000s (and 27 after the United Kingdom’s departure in 2020).

It is also widely acknowledged that patents are not the only way to spur innovative R&D, and that complements include government funding and prizes. Governments have supplemented national patent policies with prizes in areas where solutions are needed e.g., the Longitude prize in 1714 by the UK government to solve the problem of determining the precise longitude of a ship, as this was causing deaths at sea. The Longitude prize has recently been re-established in 2012 around six challenge areas. See Scotchmer ( 2004 ) and David ( 1993 ) for more discussion of the array of incentives.

While conceptually these are three distinct policy levers, they are related to each other in their effects. For example, a patent system that, in terms of scope, allows multiple versions of similar inventions to be eligible for protection, may de facto offer longer periods of patent protection if the multiple patents are filed sequentially.

Cahoy ( 2011 ) provides detailed history and discussion of compulsory licensing in areas beyond pharmaceuticals.

Examples of indices along these lines include Park ( 2008 ) as a general measure, Campi and Nuvolari ( 2020 ) for agricultural technologies, Liu and La Croix ( 2015 ) for pharmaceuticals.

A prominent example of this was not recognising the Bessemer patent for steel production, granted in the UK.

Although Priority Foreign Country designation is meant to trigger the process leading to trade sanctions, countries can be sanctioned without ever being labelled as such.

The Paris Convention continues to be the reference for coordinating procedures on how patents are applied for and the respect of priority dates, for example.

The axes in Figure  1 are better thought of as “strength” of patent systems, following the earlier discussion in this paper, than “quality.” After all, for poorer countries with minimal innovative capabilities, a patent system that provides extensive rights of exclusion over a wide array of knowledge may not be of high “quality.”

While the assumption in the literature is that weak enforcement will lead to IP protection being weaker “in practice” than what’s promised “on the books,” the inverse can also be true. Some countries have patent provisions that, though designed to reduce the level of protection (within the constraints imposed by TRIPS), are under-enforced, yielding levels of “in practice” that are greater that what’s “on the books.” See Sampat and Shadlen ( 2015 , 2018 ).

Rodrik ( 2020 ) makes a similar point.

Applications made through International Bureau at the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO), based in Geneva, Switzerland take place through the Patent Cooperation Treaty route. The PCT application is published by the WIPO in one of the ten “languages of publication”: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

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Athreye, S., Piscitello, L. & Shadlen, K.C. Twenty-five years since TRIPS: Patent policy and international business. J Int Bus Policy 3 , 315–328 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s42214-020-00079-1

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• IAS Preparation
• UPSC Preparation Strategy
• Trade Related Aspects Of Intellectual Property Rights Trips

Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS)

The Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement is in the news now because of the recent US decision to support the temporary waiver of patent rules for the coronavirus vaccines. This is an important topic from multiple perspectives for the UPSC exam including economy, international relations, current affairs, etc. 

TRIPS Agreement

Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Right (TRIPS) is an agreement on international IP rights.

• TRIPS came into force in 1995, as part of the agreement that established the World Trade Organisation (WTO) .
• TRIPS establishes minimum standards for the availability, scope, and use of seven forms of intellectual property namely, trademarks, copyrights, geographical indications, patents, industrial designs, layout designs for integrated circuits, and undisclosed information or trade secrets. 
• It applies basic international trade principles regarding intellectual property to member states.
• It is applicable to all WTO members.
• TRIPS Agreement lays down the permissible exceptions and limitations for balancing the interests of intellectual property with the interests of public health and economic development.
• TRIPS is the most comprehensive international agreement on IP and it has a major role in enabling trade in creativity and knowledge, in resolving trade disputes over intellectual property, and in assuring WTO members the latitude to achieve their domestic policy objectives. 
• It frames the IP system in terms of innovation, technology transfer and public welfare. 
• The TRIPS Council is responsible for administering and monitoring the operation of the TRIPS Agreement.
• TRIPS was negotiated during the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1986–1994.
• The TRIPS Agreement is also described as a “Berne and Paris-plus” Agreement.

Read about other WTO Agreements in the link.

What are Intellectual Property Rights?

Intellectual property rights are the rights given to persons over the creations of their minds. Intellectual property rights (IPRs) are legal rights that protect these creations. In contrast to rights over tangible property, IP rights give their owners rights to exclude others from making use of their creations only for a limited period. IP rights entitle the owners to receive a royalty or any sort of financial compensation or payment when another person uses their creations.

What is Intellectual Property?

“Intellectual property” refers to creations of the mind. These creations can take many different forms, such as artistic expressions, signs, symbols and names used in commerce, designs and inventions. 

IP rights are generally classified into two categories:

• Copyright and rights related to copyright: This rights relates to rights protecting art works, literary works, computer programmes, films, musical compositions, sculptures, paintings, etc. Related rights also include rights of performers, broadcasting organisations, and producers of phonograms (sound recordings). The main purpose of protection of copyright and related rights is to encourage and reward creative work.
• The protection of distinctive signs, especially trademarks (which differentiate the goods or services of one organisation/establishment from those of other undertakings) and geographical indications. These rights are aimed at protecting and ensuring fair competition consumer protection.
• The second type of industrial property rights are protected primarily to stimulate innovation, design and the creation of technology. These rights protect innovations by patents, trade secrets and industrial designs.

Read more on intellectual property rights in the linked article.

TRIPS Significance

The TRIPS Agreement makes protection of intellectual property rights an integral part of the multilateral trading system, as embodied in the WTO. The agreement is often termed one of the three “pillars” of the WTO, the other two being trade in goods (the traditional domain of the GATT) and trade in services.

Before TRIPS, the extent of protection and enforcement of IP rights varied widely across nations and as intellectual property became more important in trade, these differences became a source of tension in international economic relations. Therefore, it was considered prudent to have new trade rules for IP rights in order to have more order and predictability, and also to settle disputes in an orderly manner.

TRIPS Agreement Latest News

In view of the COVID-19 pandemic, India and South Africa had proposed to the WTO in October 2020 that the TRIPS Agreement (that included patent protection to pharmaceutical products including COVID vaccines) be waived off for COVID vaccines, medicines and diagnostics for the time period of the pandemic in order to make vaccines and drugs for COVID available to a maximum number of people worldwide.

If the vaccines are patent protected, only a few pharmaceutical companies from developed western countries would be able to manufacture it, making such drugs unavailable or inaccessible due to the high costs to people of other countries, especially, developing and least developed countries.

The US, which was opposed to any TRIPS waiver, has backed this proposal, along with the EU. This move has been welcomed by many since it might lead to the manufacture of more volumes of COVID vaccines enabling the whole world to get rid of the coronavirus at the earliest. However, pharmaceutical companies have protested the move saying this would not necessarily ensure vaccine availability since developing countries did not have the capability to produce the vaccines.

Arguments in favour of relaxing TRIPS rules 

• This would make the vaccines more available to people of developing countries and also LDCs.
• Life-saving drugs and vaccines should be made available to everyone and pharmaceutical companies should not be looking to make profits out of these. There is an ethical and moral issue here.
• With particular reference to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is said that no one is safe unless everyone is safe. In this respect, it is imperative that vaccines are made available to everyone in countries affected since it can easily spread to all countries as seen in the first wave.
• Rules granting monopolies that place the right to access basic healthcare in a position of constant peril must end.

Arguments made by opponents of TRIPS waiver

• Unless corporations are rewarded for their inventions, they would be unable to recoup amounts invested by them in research and development.
• Without the right to monopolise production there will be no incentive to innovate. 
• They also claim that companies in the developing world do not have the capacity to manufacture vaccines or drugs on a large scale.

Just a waiver of the IP rights rules without further assistance such as technology transfer to generic pharmaceutical companies in developing countries would render the move useless. This is because there would also necessitate tech transfer for the pharmaceutical companies to start the production since vaccines like the mRNA vaccines require highly sophisticated manufacturing equipment. Not only technology and equipment, raw materials and probably personnel would also need to be transferred for developing countries to be able to produce vaccines on a large scale.

It could also take several years before the generic pharmaceutical companies’ plants become operational at optimal capacity and produce vaccines, which is a problem because it is doubted whether vaccines produced today would be effective against any new strain of the virus.

TRIPS Agreement:- Download PDF Here

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What is Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs)?

• TRIPs provide minimum standards in the form of common set of rules for the protection of intellectual property globally under WTO system.
• The TRIPs agreement gives set of provisions deals with domestic procedures and remedies for the enforcement of intellectual property rights.
• Member countries have to prepare necessary national laws to implement the TRIPs provisions.
• TRIPs cover eight areas for IPRs legislation including patent, copyright and geographical indications.

The TRIPs regime

A breakthrough of the GATT signed in 1994 was that it brought TRIPs as a common standard for the protection of intellectual property globally. Implication of TRIPs is that member countries should design domestic intellectual property legislations on the basis of the TRIPs provisions.

TRIPs as WTO’s IPR regime

TRIPs is considered as a major achievement of the Uruguay Round as an international trade agreement. At the trade negotiations, the developed countries were succeeded in linking intellectual property rights with trade. Until then, the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) was the exclusive international institution dealing with intellectual property. With TRIPs, the WTO also emerged as the institution for the protection and promotion of intellectual property globally.

What TRIPs instructs to member countries?

As per the TRIPs provisions, the member countries are required to prepare the necessary legal framework spelling out the scope and standards of protection for rights in regard to intellectual property. Or in other words, the member countries have to adopt TRIPs provisions in their domestic intellectual property legislations like Patent Act, Copyright Act etc.

           WTO advocate necessary amendments to national IPR laws to accommodate the TRIPs provisions. TRIPs agreement is an effort to bring national legislations under common international rules. An important feature of TRIPs is that it is more specific and hard on ‘patents’ -the most important form of intellectual property. In the case of plant rights, geographical indications etc., members can adopt a sui-generis (own designed) IPR regime.

WTO gives following areas of intellectual property – copyright and related rights, trademarks, protection of undisclosed information (trade secrets), geographical indications, industrial designs, integrated circuits, patents, and control of anti-competitive practices in contractual licences. Signing TRIPs means countries have to modify their Patent Act, Copy Right Act, Trade Mark Act etc., in accordance with the provisions of the TRIPs. In India, the government has made a major amendment to the 1970 Patent Act in 2005 to accommodate the TRIPs provisions. In 2010, the Copyright Act was amended and enforced from 2012. Other legislations with respect to Industrial designs also have been made.

The rationale for WTO’s effort to bring an intellectual property protection regime globally

The WTO supports IPR regime under its leadership on the ground that intellectual property is a trade related asset. It asserts that an international attempt is needed because of the wide differences existing in the intellectual property regime across the world.

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What is Advanced Pricing Agreement?

• Google Transit
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• Static Transit

Google Transit GTFS Schedule Reference and Differences

This page describes the major differences between the official GTFS Schedule and Google Transit's implementation of the specification in the following areas:

Ignored official specifications: These fields are part of the official GTFS. Google Transit ingests this data without error but doesn't proactively use the data.

Different interpretation: These fields include the parts of the official GTFS that Google Transit interprets differently than the GTFS definition of those parts.

Experimental support: These fields are experimental in Google Transit’s implementation. If you want to implement a new experimental field, contact the Google Transit team .

Google Transit-supported extension: This extension is not part of the official GTFS. The Transit-supported extension includes both public extensions and Google Transit-specific extensions. Any partner can send this information to Transit in their feed.

Static transit

The following sections document the major differences between the official GTFS and Google Transit's implementation of the static feed.

Ignored official specifications in static feeds

Some official specifications that are ignored by Transit are experimental. To learn more, go to gtfs.org .

Table 1 lists GTFS files that aren't supported by Transit in static feeds. Also, none of the fields that are defined in these files are supported by Transit.

Table 2 lists all the GTFS-defined fields that are ignored by Transit in the static feeds.

Different interpretation in static feeds

Although Transit accepts certain GTFS-defined fields, Transit interprets them differently than the GTFS.

Table 3 shows the fields in static feeds that Transit implements differently than as described in the GTFS.

Experimental support in static feeds

If you need support to integrate new experimental fields in this category, contact Google Transit .

Google Transit-supported extensions in static feeds

Table 4 provides information about Google Transit extensions . These fields aren't part of the official GTFS.

Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License , and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License . For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies . Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

Last updated 2024-02-26 UTC.

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• Dataset Files
• File Requirements
• Dataset Publishing & General Practices
• calendar.txt
• calendar_dates.txt
• fare_attributes.txt
• fare_rules.txt
• fare_media.txt
• fare_products.txt
• fare_leg_rules.txt
• fare_transfer_rules.txt
• stop_areas.txt
• networks.txt
• route_networks.txt
• frequencies.txt
• pathways.txt
• location_groups.txt
• location_group_stops.txt
• locations.geojson
• booking_rules.txt
• translations.txt
• feed_info.txt
• attributions.txt
• Best Practices

GTFS Schedule Reference ¶

Revised Nov 16, 2023. See Revision History for more details.

This document defines the format and structure of the files that comprise a GTFS dataset.

Table of Contents ¶

• Document Conventions
• stop_times.txt
• timeframes.txt
• transfers.txt

Document Conventions ¶

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", “SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 .

Term Definitions ¶

This section defines terms that are used throughout this document.

• Dataset - A complete set of files defined by this specification reference. Altering the dataset creates a new version of the dataset. Datasets should be published at a public, permanent URL, including the zip file name. (e.g., https://www.agency.org/gtfs/gtfs.zip).
• Record - A basic data structure comprised of a number of different field values describing a single entity (e.g. transit agency, stop, route, etc.). Represented, in a table, as a row.
• Field - A property of an object or entity. Represented, in a table, as a column. The field exists if added in a file as a header. It may or may not have field values defined.
• Field value - An individual entry in a field. Represented, in a table, as a single cell.
• Service day - A service day is a time period used to indicate route scheduling. The exact definition of service day varies from agency to agency but service days often do not correspond with calendar days. A service day may exceed 24:00:00 if service begins on one day and ends on a following day. For example, service that runs from 08:00:00 on Friday to 02:00:00 on Saturday, could be denoted as running from 08:00:00 to 26:00:00 on a single service day.
• Text-to-speech field - The field should contain the same information than its parent field (on which it falls back if it is empty). It is aimed to be read as text-to-speech, therefore, abbreviation should be either removed ("St" should be either read as "Street" or "Saint"; "Elizabeth I" should be "Elizabeth the first") or kept to be read as it ("JFK Airport" is said abbreviated).
• Leg - Travel in which a rider boards and alights between a pair of subsequent locations along a trip.
• Journey - Overall travel from origin to destination, including all legs and transfers in-between.
• Sub-journey - Two or more legs that comprise a subset of a journey.
• Fare product - Purchassable fare products that can be used to pay for or validate travel.

Presence ¶

Presence conditions applicable to fields and files:

• Required - The field or file must be included in the dataset and contain a valid value for each record.
• Optional - The field or file may be omitted from the dataset.
• Conditionally Required - The field or file must be included under conditions outlined in the field or file description.
• Conditionally Forbidden - The field or file must not be included under conditions outlined in the field or file description.
• Recommended - The field or file may be omitted from the dataset, but it is a best practice to include it. Before omitting this field or file, the best practice should be carefully evaluated and the full implications of omission should be understood.

Field Types ¶

• Color - A color encoded as a six-digit hexadecimal number. Refer to https://htmlcolorcodes.com to generate a valid value (the leading "#" must not be included). Example: FFFFFF for white, 000000 for black or 0039A6 for the A,C,E lines in NYMTA.
• Currency code - An ISO 4217 alphabetical currency code. For the list of current currency, refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_4217#Active_codes . Example: CAD for Canadian dollars, EUR for euros or JPY for Japanese yen.
• Currency amount - A decimal value indicating a currency amount. The number of decimal places is specified by ISO 4217 for the accompanying Currency code. All financial calculations should be processed as decimal, currency, or another equivalent type suitable for financial calculations depending on the programming language used to consume data. Processing currency amounts as float is discouraged due to gains or losses of money during calculations.
• Date - Service day in the YYYYMMDD format. Since time within a service day may be above 24:00:00, a service day may contain information for the subsequent day(s). Example: 20180913 for September 13th, 2018.
• Email - An email address. Example: [email protected]
• Enum - An option from a set of predefined constants defined in the "Description" column. Example: The route_type field contains a 0 for tram, a 1 for subway...
• ID - An ID field value is an internal ID, not intended to be shown to riders, and is a sequence of any UTF-8 characters. Using only printable ASCII characters is recommended. An ID is labeled "unique ID" when it must be unique within a file. IDs defined in one .txt file are often referenced in another .txt file. IDs that reference an ID in another table are labeled "foreign ID". Example: The stop_id field in stops.txt is a "unique ID". The parent_station field in stops.txt is a "foreign ID referencing stops.stop_id ".
• Language code - An IETF BCP 47 language code. For an introduction to IETF BCP 47, refer to http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/bcp/bcp47.txt and http://www.w3.org/International/articles/language-tags/ . Example: en for English, en-US for American English or de for German.
• Latitude - WGS84 latitude in decimal degrees. The value must be greater than or equal to -90.0 and less than or equal to 90.0. Example: 41.890169 for the Colosseum in Rome.
• Longitude - WGS84 longitude in decimal degrees. The value must be greater than or equal to -180.0 and less than or equal to 180.0. Example: 12.492269 for the Colosseum in Rome.
• Float - A floating point number.
• Integer - An integer.
• Phone number - A phone number.
• Time - Time in the HH:MM:SS format (H:MM:SS is also accepted). The time is measured from "noon minus 12h" of the service day (effectively midnight except for days on which daylight savings time changes occur). For times occurring after midnight on the service day, enter the time as a value greater than 24:00:00 in HH:MM:SS. Example: 14:30:00 for 2:30PM or 25:35:00 for 1:35AM on the next day.
• Text - A string of UTF-8 characters, which is aimed to be displayed and which must therefore be human readable.
• Timezone - TZ timezone from the https://www.iana.org/time-zones . Timezone names never contain the space character but may contain an underscore. Refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_zones for a list of valid values. Example: Asia/Tokyo , America/Los_Angeles or Africa/Cairo .
• URL - A fully qualified URL that includes http:// or https://, and any special characters in the URL must be correctly escaped. See the following http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/4_URI_Recommentations.html for a description of how to create fully qualified URL values.

Field Signs ¶

Signs applicable to Float or Integer field types:

• Non-negative - Greater than or equal to 0.
• Non-zero - Not equal to 0.
• Positive - Greater than 0.

Example: Non-negative float - A floating point number greater than or equal to 0.

Dataset Attributes ¶

The primary key of a dataset is the field or combination of fields that uniquely identify a row. Primary key (*) is used when all provided fields for a file are used to uniquely identify a row. Primary key (none) means that the file allows only one row.

Example: the trip_id and stop_sequence fields make the primary key of stop_times.txt .

Dataset Files ¶

This specification defines the following files:

File Requirements ¶

The following requirements apply to the format and contents of the dataset files:

• All files must be saved as comma-delimited text.
• The first line of each file must contain field names. Each subsection of the Field Definitions section corresponds to one of the files in a GTFS dataset and lists the field names that may be used in that file.
• All file and field names are case-sensitive.
• Field values must not contain tabs, carriage returns or new lines.
• Field values that contain quotation marks or commas must be enclosed within quotation marks. In addition, each quotation mark in the field value must be preceded with a quotation mark. This is consistent with the manner in which Microsoft Excel outputs comma-delimited (CSV) files. For more information on the CSV file format, see http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180 . The following example demonstrates how a field value would appear in a comma-delimited file:
• Original field value: Contains "quotes", commas and text
• Field value in CSV file: "Contains ""quotes"", commas and text"
• Field values must not contain HTML tags, comments or escape sequences.
• Extra spaces between fields or field names should be removed. Many parsers consider the spaces to be part of the value, which may cause errors.
• Each line must end with a CRLF or LF linebreak character.
• Files should be encoded in UTF-8 to support all Unicode characters. Files that include the Unicode byte-order mark (BOM) character are acceptable. See http://unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html#BOM for more information on the BOM character and UTF-8.
• All dataset files must be zipped together. The files must reside at the root level directly, not in a subfolder.
• All customer-facing text strings (including stop names, route names, and headsigns) should use Mixed Case (not ALL CAPS), following local conventions for capitalization of place names on displays capable of displaying lower case characters (e.g. “Brighton Churchill Square”, “Villiers-sur-Marne”, “Market Street”).
• The use of abbreviations should be avoided throughout the feed for names and other text (e.g. St. for Street) unless a location is called by its abbreviated name (e.g. “JFK Airport”). Abbreviations may be problematic for accessibility by screen reader software and voice user interfaces. Consuming software can be engineered to reliably convert full words to abbreviations for display, but converting from abbreviations to full words is prone to more risk of error.

Dataset Publishing & General Practices ¶

• Datasets should be published at a public, permanent URL, including the zip file name. (e.g., www.agency.org/gtfs/gtfs.zip). Ideally, the URL should be directly downloadable without requiring login to access the file, to facilitate download by consuming software applications. While it is recommended (and the most common practice) to make a GTFS dataset openly downloadable, if a data provider does need to control access to GTFS for licensing or other reasons, it is recommended to control access to the GTFS dataset using API keys, which will facilitate automatic downloads.
• GTFS data should be published in iterations so that a single file at a stable location always contains the latest official description of service for a transit agency (or agencies).
• Datasets should maintain persistent identifiers (id fields) for stop_id , route_id , and agency_id across data iterations whenever possible.
• At any time, the published GTFS dataset should be valid for at least the next 7 days, and ideally for as long as the operator is confident that the schedule will continue to be operated.
• If possible, the GTFS dataset should cover at least the next 30 days of service.
• Old services (expired calendars) should be removed from the feed.
• If a service modification will go into effect in 7 days or fewer, this service change should be expressed through a GTFS-realtime feed (service advisories or trip updates) rather than static GTFS dataset.
• The web-server hosting GTFS data should be configured to correctly report the file modification date (see HTTP/1.1 - Request for Comments 2616, under Section 14.29 ).

Field Definitions ¶

Agency.txt ¶.

File: Required

Primary key ( agency_id )

stops.txt ¶

Primary key ( stop_id )

routes.txt ¶

Primary key ( route_id )

trips.txt ¶

Primary key ( trip_id )

Example: Blocks and service day ¶

The example below is valid, with distinct blocks every day of the week.

Notes on above table:

• On Friday into Saturday morning, for example, a single vehicle operates trip_1 , trip_2 , and trip_3 (10:00 PM through 12:55 AM). Note that the last trip occurs on Saturday, 12:00 AM to 12:55 AM, but is part of the Friday “service day” because the times are 24:00:00 to 24:55:00.
• On Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, a single vehicle operates trip_1 , trip_4 , and trip_5 in a block from 8:00 PM to 10:55 PM.

stop_times.txt ¶

Primary key ( trip_id , stop_sequence )

On-demand Service Routing Behavior ¶

• When providing routing or travel time between the origin and destination, data consumers should ignore intermediate stop_times.txt records with the same trip_id that have start_pickup_drop_off_window and end_pickup_drop_off_window defined. For examples that demonstrate what should be ignored, see the data example page .
• Simultaneous overlap of locations.geojson id geometry, start/end_pickup_drop_off_window time, and pickup_type or drop_off_type between two or more stop_times.txt records with the same trip_id is forbidden. For examples that demonstrate what is forbidden, see the data example page .

calendar.txt ¶

File: Conditionally Required

Primary key ( service_id )

calendar_dates.txt ¶

Primary key ( service_id , date )

The calendar_dates.txt table explicitly activates or disables service by date. It may be used in two ways.

• Recommended: Use calendar_dates.txt in conjunction with calendar.txt to define exceptions to the default service patterns defined in calendar.txt . If service is generally regular, with a few changes on explicit dates (for instance, to accommodate special event services, or a school schedule), this is a good approach. In this case calendar_dates.service_id is a foreign ID referencing calendar.service_id .
• Alternate: Omit calendar.txt , and specify each date of service in calendar_dates.txt . This allows for considerable service variation and accommodates service without normal weekly schedules. In this case service_id is an ID.

fare_attributes.txt ¶

File: Optional

Primary key ( fare_id )

Versions There are two modelling options for describing fares. GTFS-Fares V1 is the legacy option for describing minimal fare information. GTFS-Fares V2 is an updated method that allows for a more detailed account of an agency's fare structure. Both are allowed to be present in a dataset, but only one method should be used by a data consumer for a given dataset. It is recommended that GTFS-Fares V2 takes precedence over GTFS-Fares V1. The files associated with GTFS-Fares V1 are: - fare_attributes.txt - fare_rules.txt The files associated with GTFS-Fares V2 are: - fare_media.txt - fare_products.txt - fare_leg_rules.txt - fare_transfer_rules.txt

fare_rules.txt ¶

Primary key ( * )

The fare_rules.txt table specifies how fares in fare_attributes.txt apply to an itinerary. Most fare structures use some combination of the following rules:

• Fare depends on origin or destination stations.
• Fare depends on which zones the itinerary passes through.
• Fare depends on which route the itinerary uses.

For examples that demonstrate how to specify a fare structure with fare_rules.txt and fare_attributes.txt , see FareExamples in the GoogleTransitDataFeed open source project wiki.

timeframes.txt ¶

Primary key (*)

Used to describe fares that can vary based on the time of day, the day of the week, or a particular day in the year. Timeframes can be associated with fare products in fare_leg_rules.txt . There must not be overlapping time intervals for the same timeframe_group_id and service_id values.

Timeframe Local Time Semantics ¶

• When evaluating a fare event’s time against timeframes.txt , the event time is computed in local time using the local timezone, as determined by the stop_timezone , if specified, of the stop or parent station for the fare event. If not specified, the feed’s agency timezone should be used instead.
• The “current day” is the current date of the fare event’s time, computed relative to the local timezone. The “current day” may be different from the service day of a fare leg’s trip, especially for trips that extend past midnight.
• The “time-of-day” for the fare event is computed relative to “current day” using GTFS Time field-type semantics.

fare_media.txt ¶

Primary Key ( fare_media_id )

To describe the different fare media that can be employed to use fare products. Fare media are physical or virtual holders used for the representation and/or validation of a fare product.

fare_products.txt ¶

Primary Key ( fare_product_id , fare_media_id )

Used to describe the range of fares available for purchase by riders or taken into account when computing the total fare for journeys with multiple legs, such as transfer costs.

fare_leg_rules.txt ¶

Primary Key ( network_id, from_area_id, to_area_id, from_timeframe_group_id, to_timeframe_group_id, fare_product_id )

Fare rules for individual legs of travel.

Fares in fare_leg_rules.txt must be queried by filtering all the records in the file to find rules that match the leg to be traveled by the rider.

To process the cost of a leg:

The file fare_leg_rules.txt must be filtered by the fields that define the characteristics of travel, these fields are:

• fare_leg_rules.network_id
• fare_leg_rules.from_area_id
• fare_leg_rules.to_area_id
• fare_leg_rules.from_timeframe_group_id
• fare_leg_rules.to_timeframe_group_id

If the leg exactly matches a record in fare_leg_rules.txt based on the characteristics of travel, that record must be processed to determine the cost of the leg.

If no exact matches are found, then empty entries in fare_leg_rules.network_id , fare_leg_rules.from_area_id , and fare_leg_rules.to_area_id must be checked to process the cost of the leg:

• An empty entry in fare_leg_rules.network_id corresponds to all networks defined in routes.txt or networks.txt excluding the ones listed under fare_leg_rules.network_id
• An empty entry in fare_leg_rules.from_area_id corresponds to all areas defined in areas.area_id excluding the ones listed under fare_leg_rules.from_area_id
• An empty entry in fare_leg_rules.to_area_id corresponds to all areas defined in areas.area_id excluding the ones listed under fare_leg_rules.to_area_id

If the leg does not match any of the rules described above, then the fare is unknown.

fare_transfer_rules.txt ¶

Primary Key ( from_leg_group_id, to_leg_group_id, fare_product_id, transfer_count, duration_limit )

Fare rules for transfers between legs of travel defined in fare_leg_rules.txt .

To process the cost of a multi-leg journey:

• The applicable fare leg groups defined in fare_leg_rules.txt should be determined for all individual legs of travel based on the rider’s journey.

The file fare_transfer_rules.txt must be filtered by the fields that define the characteristics of the transfer, these fields are:

• fare_transfer_rules.from_leg_group_id
• fare_transfer_rules.to_leg_group_id

If the transfer exactly matches a record in fare_transfer_rules.txt based on the characteristics of the transfer, then that record must be processed to determine the transfer cost.

• An empty entry in fare_transfer_rules.from_leg_group_id corresponds to all leg groups defined under fare_leg_rules.leg_group_id excluding the ones listed under fare_transfer_rules.from_leg_group_id
• An empty entry in fare_transfer_rules.to_leg_group_id corresponds to all leg groups defined under fare_leg_rules.leg_group_id excluding the ones listed under fare_transfer_rules.to_leg_group_id
• If the transfer does not match any of the rules described above, then there is no transfer arrangement and the legs are considered separate.

areas.txt ¶

Primary key ( area_id )

Defines area identifiers.

stop_areas.txt ¶

Assigns stops from stops.txt to areas.

networks.txt ¶

File: Conditionally Forbidden

Primary key ( network_id )

Defines network identifiers that apply for fare leg rules.

route_networks.txt ¶

Assigns routes from routes.txt to networks.

shapes.txt ¶

Primary key ( shape_id , shape_pt_sequence )

Shapes describe the path that a vehicle travels along a route alignment, and are defined in the file shapes.txt. Shapes are associated with Trips, and consist of a sequence of points through which the vehicle passes in order. Shapes do not need to intercept the location of Stops exactly, but all Stops on a trip should lie within a small distance of the shape for that trip, i.e. close to straight line segments connecting the shape points.

frequencies.txt ¶

Primary key ( trip_id , start_time )

Frequencies.txt represents trips that operate on regular headways (time between trips). This file may be used to represent two different types of service.

• Frequency-based service ( exact_times = 0 ) in which service does not follow a fixed schedule throughout the day. Instead, operators attempt to strictly maintain predetermined headways for trips.
• A compressed representation of schedule-based service ( exact_times = 1 ) that has the exact same headway for trips over specified time period(s). In schedule-based service operators try to strictly adhere to a schedule.

transfers.txt ¶

Primary key ( from_stop_id , to_stop_id , from_trip_id , to_trip_id , from_route_id , to_route_id )

When calculating an itinerary, GTFS-consuming applications interpolate transfers based on allowable time and stop proximity. Transfers.txt specifies additional rules and overrides for selected transfers.

Fields from_trip_id , to_trip_id , from_route_id and to_route_id allow higher orders of specificity for transfer rules. Along with from_stop_id and to_stop_id , the ranking of specificity is as follows:

• Both trip_id s defined: from_trip_id and to_trip_id .
• One trip_id and route_id set defined: ( from_trip_id and to_route_id ) or ( from_route_id and to_trip_id ).
• One trip_id defined: from_trip_id or to_trip_id .
• Both route_id s defined: from_route_id and to_route_id .
• One route_id defined: from_route_id or to_route_id .
• Only from_stop_id and to_stop_id defined: no route or trip related fields set.

For a given ordered pair of arriving trip and departing trip, the transfer with the greatest specificity that applies between these two trips is chosen. For any pair of trips, there should not be two transfers with equally maximal specificity that could apply.

Linked trips ¶

The following applies to transfer_type=4 and =5 , which are used to link trips together, with or without in-seats transfers.

The trips linked together MUST be operated by the same vehicle. The vehicle MAY be coupled to, or uncoupled from, other vehicles.

If both a linked trips transfer and a block_id are provided and they produce conflicting results, then the linked trips transfer shall be used.

The last stop of from_trip_id SHOULD be geographically close to the first stop of to_trip_id , and the last arrival time of from_trip_id SHOULD be prior but close to the first departure time of to_trip_id . The last arrival time of from_trip_id MAY be later than the first departure time of to_trip_id in case the to_trip_id trip is occurring the subsequent service day.

Trips MAY be linked 1-to-1 in the regular case, but MAY also be linked 1-to-n, n-to-1, or n-to-n to represent more complex trip continuations. For example, two train trips (trip A and trip B in the diagram below) can merge into a single train trip (trip C) after a vehicle coupling operation at a common station:

• In a 1-to-n continuation, the trips.service_id for each to_trip_id MUST be identical.
• In an n-to-1 continuation, the trips.service_id for each from_trip_id MUST be identical.
• n-to-n continuations must respect both constraints.
• Trips may be linked together as part of multiple distinct continuations, provided that the trip.service_id MUST NOT overlap on any day of service.

pathways.txt ¶

Primary key ( pathway_id )

Files pathways.txt and levels.txt use a graph representation to describe subway or train stations, with nodes representing locations and edges representing pathways.

To navigate from the station entrance/exit (a node represented as a location with location_type=2 ) to a platform (a node represented as a location with location_type=0 or empty), the rider will move through walkways, fare gates, stairs, and other edges represented as pathways. Generic nodes (nodes represented with location_type=3 ) can be used to connect pathways throughout a station.

Pathways must be defined exhaustively in a station. If any pathways are defined, it is assumed that all pathways throughout the station are represented. Therefore, the following guidelines apply:

• No dangling locations: If any location within a station has a pathway, then all locations within that station should have pathways, except for platforms that have boarding areas ( location_type=4 , see guideline below).
• No pathways for a platform with boarding areas: A platform ( location_type=0 or empty) that has boarding areas ( location_type=4 ) is treated as a parent object, not a point. In such cases, the platform must not have pathways assigned. All pathways should be assigned for each of the platform's boarding areas.
• No locked platforms: Each platform ( location_type=0 or empty) or boarding area ( location_type=4 ) must be connected to at least one entrance/exit ( location_type=2 ) via some chain of pathways. Stations not allowing a pathway to the outside of the station from a given platform are rare.

levels.txt ¶

Primary key ( level_id )

Describes levels in a station. Useful in conjunction with pathways.txt .

location_groups.txt ¶

Primary key ( location_group_id )

Defines location groups, which are groups of stops where a rider may request pickup or drop off.

location_group_stops.txt ¶

Assigns stops from stops.txt to location groups.

locations.geojson ¶

Defines zones where riders can request either pickup or drop off by on-demand services. These zones are represented as GeoJSON polygons. - This file uses a subset of the GeoJSON format, described in RFC 7946 . - The locations.geojson file must contain a FeatureCollection . - A FeatureCollection defines various stop locations where riders may request pickup or drop off. - Every GeoJSON Feature must have an id . The id must be unique across all stops.stop_id , locations.geojson id , and location_group_id values. - Every GeoJSON Feature should have objects and associated keys according to the table below:

booking_rules.txt ¶

Primary key ( booking_rule_id )

Defines the booking rules for rider-requested services

translations.txt ¶

Primary key ( table_name , field_name , language , record_id , record_sub_id , field_value )

In regions that have multiple official languages, transit agencies/operators typically have language-specific names and web pages. In order to best serve riders in those regions, it is useful for the dataset to include these language-dependent values.

If both referencing methods ( record_id , record_sub_id ) and field_value are used to translate the same value in 2 different rows, the translation provided with ( record_id , record_sub_id ) takes precedence.

feed_info.txt ¶

File: Recommended ( Required if translations.txt is provided)

Primary key (none)

The file contains information about the dataset itself, rather than the services that the dataset describes. In some cases, the publisher of the dataset is a different entity than any of the agencies.

attributions.txt ¶

Primary key ( attribution_id )

The file defines the attributions applied to the dataset.

U.S. tourist faces 12 years in prison after taking ammunition to Turks and Caicos

An Oklahoma man faces up to 12 years in prison on a Caribbean island after customs officials found ammunition in his luggage.

Ryan Watson traveled to Turks and Caicos with his wife, Valerie, to celebrate his 40th birthday on April 7. They went with two friends who had also turned 40.

The vacation came to an abrupt end when airport staff members found a zip-close bag containing bullets in the couple's carry-on luggage. Watson said it was hunting ammunition he had accidentally brought with him — but under a strict law in Turks and Caicos, a court may still impose a mandatory 12-year sentence.

"They were hunting ammunition rounds that I use for whitetail deer," Watson told NBC Boston in an interview conducted last week that aired after their first court appearance Tuesday.

"I recognized them, and I thought, 'Oh, man, what a bonehead mistake that I had no idea that those were in there,'" he said.

The couple were arrested and charged with possession of ammunition. Authorities seized their passports and explained the penalties they faced.

Valerie Watson said in the interview: "When I heard that, I immediately was terrified, because I was like we can't both be in prison for 12 years. We have kids at home, and this is such an innocent mistake."

The charges against her were dropped, and she returned home to Oklahoma City on Tuesday after the court hearing to be reunited with her two young children.

"Our goal is to get Ryan home, because we can’t be a family without Dad," she said.

The couple also spoke about the financial burden of a much longer-than-planned trip. "This is something that we may never recover from," Ryan Watson said.

The U.S. Embassy in the Bahamas issued a warning to travelers in September about a law that strongly prohibits possession of firearms or ammunition in Turks and Caicos, an overseas British territory southeast of the Bahamas that is a popular vacation spot.

It said: "We wish to remind all travelers that declaring a weapon in your luggage with an airline carrier does not grant permission to bring the weapon into TCI [Turks and Caicos Islands] and will result in your arrest."

The embassy added: "If you bring a firearm or ammunition into TCI, we will not be able to secure your release from custody."

The embassy and the government in Turks and Caicos did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The same thing happened to another American, Bryan Hagerich, of Pennsylvania, who was arrested after ammunition was found in his luggage before he tried to board a flight out of Turks and Caicos in February. He said he accidentally left it in his bag.

Hagerich was on a family vacation with his wife and two young children but has now been in the country for 70 days. He spent eight days in prison before he posted bail.

"It’s incredibly scary. You know, you just don’t know what the next day may bring — you know, what path this may take," Hagerich told NBC Boston.

"You know, it’s certainly a lot different than packing your bags and going away with your family for a few days. It’s been the worst 70 days of my life," he said.

Hagerich, once a professional baseball player, was drafted by the Florida Marlins in the MLB 2007 June amateur draft from the University of Delaware.

His case goes to trial May 3.

Patrick Smith is a London-based editor and reporter for NBC News Digital.

iPhone 16 Pro

Iphone 16: here’s another look at the rumored size and camera bump changes.

As we’ve highlighted in the past , the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro will feature a few notable design changes. New images posted on social media this week may give us our best look yet at some of these updates, including the size changes for the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max.

iPhone 16 design changes

There are two big changes shown off in the pictures, shared by our friend Sonny Dickson . First, you can clearly see the bigger form factor for the iPhone 16 Pro models. Second, the dummy units offer a great look at the redesigned camera bump on the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus.

• The iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max are slightly larger than the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus. The expectation is that the iPhone 16 Pro will feature a 6.3-inch display (up from 6.1 inches) and the iPhone 16 Pro Max will feature a 6.9-inch display (up from 6.7 inches).
• The  vertically aligned camera bump  on the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus. This will likely enable the ability for the standard iPhone 16 models to record spatial video for Vision Pro.

The iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro will be announced in September. I expect quite a few more rumors to emerge before then. What do you think of the rumored changes so far? Are you planning to upgrade to the iPhone 16 this year? Is the iPhone 16 Pro Max going to be too big? Let us know down in the comments. 

More about the iPhone 16:

• iPhone 16 Pro: Four new camera features coming this year
• iPhone 16’s new Capture button: Everything we know
• iPhone 16 Pro: Every new feature and change rumored
• Rumor: iPhone 16 Pro’s ultra-thin bezels proving to be a production challenge

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.

Check out 9to5Mac on YouTube for more Apple news:

Chance is an editor for the entire 9to5 network and covers the latest Apple news for 9to5Mac.

Tips, questions, typos to [email protected]

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7 epic day trips you can take by train from Union Station

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Unpopular opinion: The train is the best mode of vacation transportation.

I’ll take the ease of ticket purchasing, relaxed atmosphere in the stations and breathtaking scenery of train travel over the stress of flying and angst of driving any day. I’ve ridden the train up and down the Southern California coast, taken the three-day Amtrak journey from L.A. to Seattle (twice!), spent a couple of days in a scenic car over the Canadian Rockies and traveled by rail in Europe and Japan. My observation is that people are just nicer when they’re traveling by train — except for that one guy who glared at me when my coffee splashed near him as we went over a particularly bumpy bridge in Oregon.

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Dennis Mukai, an artist who lives in Ojai and travels frequently to San Juan Capistrano, San Diego and San Luis Obispo, started taking the train in 2018 when the horrific Montecito mudslides closed the 101 Freeway. “It’s now been six years,” he said. “ I rarely opt to drive as the train gives me the opportunity to read, catch up on my work or catch up on sleep.”

Taking a day trip via Amtrak is a great way to get a taste of train travel without committing to a multiday trip. In this guide, I highlight seven trips that start at Union Station, take three hours or less each way and have plenty of fun things to do within walking distance of the stations.

First, some travel tips:

• Make your time at Union Station part of your itinerary. There’s nothing like walking through the majestic entrance and halls to experience all the romanticism of train travel. You can even kick off your trip at with a celebratory Bloody Mary at classic restaurant and bar Traxx . There are several parking options. Lot B, which is right in front of the entrance, usually has plenty of open spots and is $16 for the entire day. Other lots will get you closer to the tracks, but you’ll miss out on walking through the beautiful lobby.
• You might consider upgrading to business class, as the price difference is not that significant (a recent search for a fare from L.A. to Santa Barbara was only $16 more than coach). The upsell will get you benefits such as priority boarding, less crowded cars, more leg room, a dedicated attendant, complimentary drinks and coffee and a surprisingly substantial snack box (mine had crackers, cheese, hummus, dried fruit, a beef stick and brownie crisps).
• You can bring your own food on the train — unlike with air travel, no one will throw out your $20 smoothie. There’s also the Market Café on the Pacific Surfliner, which sells snacks, light meals and beverages including coffee, beer and wine.

If you’re hoping to catch the most stunning scenery, where you sit makes a difference. If you’re heading north of L.A., try to snag a seat on the left side of the train. After leaving Union Station, you’ll roll through city stops like Glendale, and the Bob Hope Airport, and then start seeing some lush valley and agricultural views. After that, you’ll ride through the tunnels of the Santa Susana Pass and get a glimpse of the craggy rock formations in Chatsworth. Once you hit Oxnard, you’ll be in for some breathtaking vistas of the Pacific Ocean and beaches.

Heading south, a seat on the right side of the train will get you some great views once you pass San Juan Capistrano. Up until this point you’ll be inland and rolling through city stops, but some of the stations are beautiful and should be noted. You might recognize the massive Mediterranean-style station in Santa Ana from the series “True Detective” and the movie “Rain Man,” and the stop at the Anaheim station gives you a perfect view of Anaheim Stadium. After San Juan Capistrano, you’ll be treated to gorgeous views of the Pacific Ocean and beaches, and destinations for future trips, like the San Clemente Pier.

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Santa Barbara

San Juan Capistrano

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