Promoting global enforcement of intellectual property rules - and developing new structures that support research collaboration based on compliance with those rules - could benefit U.S. innovators and facilitate better commercial relations between the United States and partners around the world.
Mr. Baucus said he was particularly concerned about failure to enforce intellectual property rules.
Over the next few years, Love became known for his formidable grasp of intellectual property rules.
Intellectual property rules, for example, have increased pharmaceutical companies' power to raise prices.
Mr. Zoellick said he supports giving developing countries more time to come into compliance with intellectual property rules.
But spying on foreign firms to help your own is merely another way of ignoring the intellectual property rules that underlie technological prosperity.
Firms counter that high prices support the invention of new treatments.The South African fight concerns proposed reforms to intellectual property rules, published back in September.
Five countries, including Ukraine, Honduras and Indonesia, are challenging the Australian law as a violation of trade and intellectual property rules at the World Trade Organisation (with legal advice from the tobacco companies, say the Australians).
Throughout his career Mr. Arthus-Bertrand has often insisted on free access to his art, a particularly provocative stance in a country with a long attachment to strict intellectual property rules.
"This is a huge ideological debate and it goes way beyond software," said James Love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology, a nonprofit group affiliated with Ralph Nader that advocates less restrictive intellectual property rules.
But just as the prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund are now being questioned, as prosperity has proved elusive for countries like Brazil and Argentina, so are the W.T.O.'s intellectual property rules.
