The World Trade Organization's Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) designated minimum protection requirements for various types of intellectual property, the majority of which are based on the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property.
The goal of TRIPS was to ease international trade as the economy became increasingly knowledge-based. As WTO states...
...as intellectual property became more important in trade, these differences [in protection and enforcement] became a source of tension in international economic relations. New internationally-agreed trade rules for intellectual property rights were seen as a way to introduce more order and predictability, and for disputes to be settled more systematically.
