Investment Treaties and Intellectual Property Disputes: A Reform Agenda for Treaty Design and Adjudication

Focusing on BIT practice in middle-income countries, this book provides a systematic analysis of treaty texts and arbitral practice showing how investment protection standards, including fair and equitable treatment, expropriation, and full protection and security, interact with the territorial structure of IP.

Many treaties protect IP in broad terms while leaving unresolved questions about scope, territorial reach, and the boundary between legitimate regulation and treaty breach. The result is legal uncertainty for governments, right-holders, and investors, and a shift of practical dispute resolution away from national frameworks. The book offers a reform agenda grounded in treaty text and practice. It develops concrete drafting options for more IP-sensitive BITs, including definitional choices, safeguards for public-interest regulation, and dispute settlement design tailored to IP claims. It also proposes a longer-term institutional option, a specialised international forum for IP disputes, to support more coherent handling of IP claims than the current fragmented pathways.

This book will be of interest to students, researchers and policymakers in the fields of Intellectual Property Law, International Investment Law, and International Investment Arbitration.