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The debate over international intellectual property rights has become an important foreign policy issue for many industrialized countries, and particularly for the United States. US companies complain that they have suffered greatly from the lack of rigorous and uniform international standards for intellectual property rights, and the US government has consequently undertaken to strengthen rights protection - through bilateral consultations with other countries and through multilateral forums such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Most developing countries have committed to raise their standards of intellectual property protection, but how quickly they will adopt new standards of protection and what form the standards will take remain open questions.