In 2000, WIPO’s member states designated 26 April – the day on which the WIPO Convention came into force in 1970 – as ‘World IP Day’ with the aim of increasing public awareness and general understanding of intellectual property. The theme of this year’s World IP Day is “Digital Creativity: Culture Reimagined”. The focus is on the role of intellectual property in the current digital age.
Needless to say, advances in technology have posed challenges for intellectual property throughout the years. For example, there was a time when brand owners were primarily concerned about infringement appearing in the physical sense, for example on a product or perhaps on a shop front. Nowadays, brand owners also need to be vigilant about the possible uses of the brands in cyberspace, including on social media platforms, App stores, online marketplaces, search engines (for example, as Adwords) and in domain names.
The expansion of the Internet has also caused serious concerns for content producers. The Internet has provided a platform where movies can be copied quickly, music can be downloaded illegally and software programs easily allow the manipulation and storage of vast amounts of data. To add to this, it is often difficult to know where all this activity is occurring as the Internet breaks down territorial barriers. The seeming anonymity of the Internet also makes it difficult to identify individual infringers and it is all to easy for infringers to set up mirror websites with infringing content.
One of the ways to try to address these concerns was WIPO’s implementation of two international treaties: the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the WIPO Performers and Phonograms Treaty of 1996. The two treaties layered on new provisions over the major existing WIPO treaties (such as the Berne and Rome Conventions) in order to respond in particular to developments in technology and in the marketplace. In addition, brand owners can take advantage of the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy in order to address the issue of rade marks being used within domain names without the trade mark owner’s consent.
To find out more and see if a World IP Day event is going on near you, check out the WIPO World IP Day page here. For those in London, these events may be of interest: