The Principle of National Treatment in the International Conventions Protecting Intellectual Property

National treatment is one of the fundamental principles in the international conventions protecting intellectual property. It is established in the most important conventions — as, e.g., in the Paris Convention, the Berne Convention, the Rome Convention, the Universal Copyright Convention, TRIPS, NAFTA and the WPPT, also in the WCT that under its Article 3 makes Articles 2 — 6 part of the WCT. There are only a few conventions not applying the national treatment principle, such as, the Geneva Phonograms Convention and the Brussels Satellite Convention, and those do not confer private rights to the beneficiaries who shall be protected, but leave it to the Contracting States to choose the legal means of protection.

National treatment is the simple and ingenious solution to solve the problem of worldwide protection for creative inventors and authors. According to the principle of territoriality, countries can grant protection only within the boundaries of their own territory. Worldwide protection can be provided only by international treaties having as members the greatest possible number of countries. But when concluding such treaties, the nature and scope of protection accorded to nationals of other member states was an issue that still had to be solved. Worldwide harmonization of national intellectual property appeared to be unrealistic, and reciprocity as a general principle would have led to a patchwork system of mutual protection, including the need to find out in individual cases what kind of protection was granted by the laws of the other country in question. National treatment, under which a treaty member accords nationals of other member states the same treatment it accords its own nationals, allows that member and its courts to apply their own law — the law they are familiar with. Supplemented by the system of minimum rights, it even has the tendency to bring about a harmonization of national laws — at least up to a certain degree.