Harmonisation of Intellectual Property Law in ASEAN

Abstract

One of the major goals of establishing the ASEAN Economic community (AEC) is to unify national markets of member states into a single ASEAN market, where goods, services, capital, and labour can freely move within the community. However, to ensure that goods can freely move within the market, both tariff and non-tariff barriers (NTBs) need to be eliminated. Significant progress has been made in reducing tariff rate to zero. Nevertheless, eliminating NTBs, particularly differences in intellectual property (IP) laws of ASEAN member states, is still challenging and thereby is considered as the major impediment to achieving a single market. Hence, in order to establish a well-functioning single market in ASEAN, harmonising IP laws among the member states would be necessary. Thus, this article aims to present the key concept, challenges of harmonisation of IP laws, as well as interesting remarks concerning IP harmonisation in ASEAN for the study of English for lawyers.