TRIP-ping Over Business Method Patents

Professor Chiappetta argues that the current effort to expand substantive international patent law harmonization to include business method patenting is ill-conceived and unsupportable. Such patents cannot be justified on the economic incentive grounds supporting the Western regimes. They are not part of the existing TRIPS agreement, and under present circumstances they should not be added. Any future agreement, bi-lateral or multi-lateral (including an extension of TRIPS), must be based on a better calibrated form of protection (less than patent) and should occur only after the persistent normative differences and the distributional consequences of international substantive harmonization have been addressed.