Intellectual Property

WIPO’s theme for World IP Day 2023 is “Women and IP: Accelerating Innovation and Creativity.” To celebrate, ITIF highlights the stories of a few of the women who rely on IP rights to accelerate innovation and creativity. Join us for these first-hand accounts of how IP enables and benefits creators, innovators, and society alike.

Juan Londoño speaks on dispute resolution mechanisms that may have a role to play in resolving some NFT and IP issues.

Critics argue developers of generative AI systems such as ChatGPT and DALL-E have unfairly trained their models on copyrighted works. Those concerns are misguided.

Internet Archive is not a noble, Robin Hood-like organization bullied by the hierarchy for helping the poor and needy, despite the story EFF and its anti-IP allies continue to spin. Court should rule in favor of publishers.

The world’s leading creative countries still have a long way to go before they can say they’ve significantly reduced digital piracy, but many are finally taking steps in the right direction toward this goal. Australia has adopted many of the best policies to better target copyright infringement, but there are a few missing that policymakers should consider.

In a recent working paper, economist Jacob Mascona found that the protections led to more innovation and higher yields for the affected crops—specifically, in the ten years following the introduction of the protections, affected crops saw a 119 percent relative increase in the development of novel plant varieties (translating to an additional 11 varieties developed each year) and an 11 percent increase in crop yields.

Copyright does not give governments censorship rights. Copyright exists to enable expression. It provides rightsholders with assurances and controls over their works, and rightsholders alone can enforce their copyrights.

Creators, industries, the economy, businesses large and small, and more than 5 million U.S. workers rely on copyright. Meanwhile, the patronage system is archaic and irrelevant in the digital age. Policymakers must ignore these unfounded, outdated, and repetitious attacks on creators’ rights, focusing instead on updating copyright laws rather than abolishing them.

There is nothing meritorious about an expanded TRIPS waiver for COVID-19 therapeutics and diagnostics IP. Just like the TRIPS waiver for COVID-19 vaccines, the expanded waiver proposal is unnecessary, inappropriate, and harmful. The United States and its allies must not allow it to continue.

A recent paper published by the Publications Office of the European Union that calculated the number of “digital sustainability” inventions by the top 2,000 R&D-investing firms between 2016 and 2018 found that Qualcomm, Intel, and General Electric filed the most digital sustainability technology priority patents.