A Globalização, a OMC e o Comércio Electrónico

• Autor(a) principal: Pereira, Alexandre Libório Dias
• Data de Publicação: 2002
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10316/28786; https://doi.org/10.20889/m47e16017
• topic: OMC; comércio eletrónico; Globalização; Propriedade Intelectual; Comércio eletrónico

Globalization, the WTO and Electronic Commerce. The Internet revolution places several questions to the regulation of world trade. This paper, originally written to support a communication presented at the Summer Course on Globalization and the WTO organized by the European Studies Association of the University of Coimbra Law Faculty, declares the myth of free trade (or the fallacy of «globalitarian mercantilism») in the Internet maintained by technoeconomic approaches. First, it analyses the substitution of public taxes by private royalties in the framework of the Agreement of Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) which provides strict patterns of IP rights protection. Of special importance is the IP right of distribution and its no international exhaustion, in particular its no exhaustion in the electronic environment since electronic deliveries are to be treated as provisions of services. Then, moral rights of human creators (authors and inventors) are simply ignored by world trade rules. Moreover, the exceptions to intellectual property rights (copyright and related rights, patents, trademarks, etc) are submitted to a general “three steps rule” of fairness which is primarily aimed to protect the demands of the world trade (more in concrete, the interests of world traders who hold IP rights). At the same time, some examples of subtle neo-protectionism can be found, such as consumer and public health protection in the European market. In the end, this works calls the attention to the paradox between the political-economical discourses of free trade that apparently justify the globalization and its rules and the actual content and impact of such rules on the freedom of trade, particularly in what concerns the admittance of «new comers» to the market.