 Peter K. Yu |
On Friday, Jan. 28, the Intellectual Property Law Center at Drake University Law School will co-host a conference on the first 15 years of the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, known commonly as the TRIPS Agreement.
Held in Athens, Ga., the event is organized by Drake’s Peter K. Yu, the Kern family chair in intellectual property law, in conjunction with the Dean Rusk Center and the Journal of Intellectual Property Law at the University of Georgia School of Law. The Journal of Intellectual Property Law is the nation’s oldest student-edited journal in the intellectual property law field.
Titled “15 Years of TRIPS Implementation: Intellectual Property Protection from a Global Perspective,” this conference explores issues that range from treaty compliance to intellectual property enforcement and from compulsory licensing to the recently negotiated Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.
Ruth Okediji, the William L. Prosser professor of law at the University of Minnesota Law School, will deliver a keynote speech on “If WIPO Leads, Should the World Follow? Decentralizing IP Norm-making Processes and the Norms that Result Therefrom.”
Other speakers include leading international intellectual property law scholars from the United States as well as Brazil, Canada, Germany, Japan and Singapore. Yu will serve as the guest editor of a special symposium issue collecting the principal papers presented at this conference.
“The TRIPS Agreement is the leading international intellectual property treaty,” said Yu, who directs the nationally renowned Intellectual Property Law Center at Drake University Law School.
“By marrying intellectual property to trade, TRIPS has transformed the global intellectual property system. I am very glad to be able to work closely with one of the nation’s most prestigious intellectual property law journals to examine the agreement’s strengths, weaknesses and effectiveness.”
Yu serves as the general editor of The WIPO Journal, published by Sweet & Maxwell in association with the World Intellectual Property Organization. Last summer, he testified before the U.S. International Trade Commission on intellectual property protection and enforcement in China. His testimony was recently adapted for an article published in a special issue of The WIPO Journal. The article is available online.
A leading expert in international intellectual property and communications law, Yu has spoken at events organized by U.N. agencies, the Chinese, EU and U.S. governments, and leading research institutions from around the world. He has delivered lectures and presentations in more than 20 countries, and his publications have been translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, Japanese, Persian, Portuguese and Spanish.
Under his leadership, the Drake Intellectual Property Law Center has served as a leading international hub for research and education in the intellectual property field. In the past two years, the U.S. News and World Report magazine has ranked the center consistently among the top 25 intellectual property law programs in the United States and one of the top five programs in the Midwest.