Intellectual property regime seeks to balance the moral and economic rights of creators and inventors with the wider interests and needs of the society. A major justification for patents and copyrights is that incentives and rewards to inventors benefit the society and “promote the progress of science and useful Arts, by securing limited period to authors and inventors the exclusive Right to their respectful writings and discoveries”. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) links the existence of an equitable and modernized patent system to incentives for inventiveness and innovative activity, a willingness to invest in industrial applications, and a favorable climate to the transfer of technology.

The conflict between the right to information and right to control information exist at any point of time. It also leads the way to establish relation between Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and human rights. This paper attempts to equate IPR with human rights, and also its historical and economic relation to human rights. The objective of protection of IPR is to promote knowledge creation and to protect the interest of intellectual property owners and help them to benefit from their invention and intellectual property assets. But, gradually the concept of inventiveness was diluted. One invention with few after relation is considered and protected resulting in deviation from the original concept of invention. Under the changed economic environment the approach to intellectual property assets is also undergoing changes. IPR has become highly relevant in various policy areas. These areas include: International trade, health, culture, investment, food security, information transmission, technological advancement, and environment. IPR developed over a period of time through bilateral, regional and multilateral treaties and through the jurisprudence developed by Courts in most of the countries.

A human rights approach to intellectual property takes what is often an implicit balance between the rights of inventors and creators and the interest of the wider society within intellectual property paradigms and makes it far more explicit and exacting. The international covenant on economics, social and cultural rights is the major international human rights instrument addressing these issues. Article 15 specifies that the countries which have been ratified or acceded to this instrument, recognize the right of everyone both to enjoy the benefits of the scientific progress and its applications1, and to benefit from the protection of moral and material interest resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of the which he is the author.2 To achieve these goals, the covenant mandates that state parties undertake a series of steps. These include those necessary for the conservation, development and diffusion of science and culture.3 More specially, state parties undertake to respect the freedom indispensable for scientific research and creative activity.4 Further, state parties make the commitment to recognize the benefits to be derived from encouragement and development of international contracts and cooperation in the scientific and cultural fields.

In the post-globalization era, developing countries are facing the challenge of balancing the promotion of global trade for generation of wealth and alleviation of poverty.6 The Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement has no doubt strengthened the private property rights of the owners of the intellectual property. However, it is questionable whether it has been able at the same time to enable the states to retain the power of safeguarding the public interest. The traditional freedom that states had in regulating IPR by limiting it to the extent of protecting the socioeconomic and industrial development of the state is restricted to a larger extent by obligations imposed by multilateral treaties like the obligation to grant patent protection to all fields of technology, product patent for food, medicine and others. When the states had freedom, they did balance the interest, for example in the field of patents, by limiting patents in food products and medicine to the process than product. The patent protection to be extended to products based on genetic materials, protection to the plant varieties through sui generic legislation, extending the umbrella of protection to extracts of plants and genes isolated from the genetic materials, have an adverse impact on the rights of the indigenous people who have been using the biological material based on the traditional knowledge. If these people are deprived of the use and are made dependant on the right holder, it should be construed as violation of their rights.

IPR has been raising complex and controversial questions. These are issues relating to the very propertisation of a host of things—life forms for example, conflict with the scientific investigations, conflict with development, conflict with the public interest, and the most important issue of its conflict with human rights regime. The existence or not of any such conflict with human rights or the nature of the interface between the two is the scope of study in this paper. It is attempted to examine the controversy, response to the apparent or real controversy by the international organizations, the suggestions, and then to focus on the specific issue of the right to health as seen from the IPR perspective.

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