In the context of the WTO, intellectual property rights (IPR) are codified in the TRIPS-agreement. While covering all the different types of IPR, landmark cases of the still young history of TRIPS have dealt with commercial copyrights. This paper summarizes the basic economics of the IPR branch commercial copyrights, reviews the TRIPS history and analyses two TRIPS landmark cases – China-IPR and US-copyrights – from an economic perspective. Eventually, the paper outlines new challenges for the international governance of IPR in the WTO context emerging from digital media. Against an economic background, the re-emergence of unilateral strategies to enforce cross-border commercial copyrights is met with skepticism against.