WIPO Magazine

Issue Number

Latest documents

• China's commitment to strengthening IP judicial protection and creating a bright future for IP rights
• Discovery or invention': the case for recalibrating the Nobel Prize for Physics
• Artificial intelligence: the new electricity
• A closer look at specialized intellectual property courts
• Harnessing the benefits of IP for development
• Latin America's first international patented invention competition
• Copyright and the currency of creativity: beyond income
• The IP journey of an Olympic Games edition
• Ambush marketing: when sponsors cry “foul”

  Ads bombard us daily – television, billboards, search engines and websites, apps, print and radio. Brands seek ways to break through this noise, to create a buzz and drive consumer demand for their products. In this pursuit, advertisers sometimes invest in sponsoring a big event, a famous individual or a team to leverage fans’ excitement to promote the sponsor’s brand. Events like the Olympic Games, the World Cup and the Super Bowl, to name a few, attract corporate sponsors that pay large sums, often in the hundreds of millions of dollars, to gain greater exposure for their brands. Sponsorships typically confer exclusive rights in a category to the sponsor, which can advertise itself as the official sponsor in that category, e.g., the official soft drink of the event.

• Intellectual property and the specificity of sports

  Over the last 40 years, I have been involved in the sports industry and have sometimes noticed sports bodies and athletes peering jealously over a fence. On the other side of that fence are the intellectual property (IP) rights afforded to literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works. Athletes have seen protection for actors, singers, musicians, dancers, and others, while performing copyrighted works, but typically, have not themselves benefitted from such protection.

Featured documents

• Blockchain and IP Law: A Match made in Crypto Heaven?

  Blockchain and related distributed ledger technologies have been a hot topic recently, with multiple industries exploring their possibilities and new blockchain use cases emerging almost every day. But how might these technologies be used in the context of intellectual property (IP) law and...

• Creative industries in the platform economy

  The digital revolution has dramatically changed the creative landscape, generating opportunities for some and challenges for others. And in the face of falling revenues, rampant online piracy and fake news, the dominance of tech giants like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Netflix and Spotify is the...

• eSport: everything to play for

  The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has declared that eSport, or competitive video gaming, could be considered a sporting activity. That is a momentous decision. eSport is an important way of reaching young people and a vitally important market for media businesses, game producers and sports...

• The role of IP rights in the fashion business: a US perspective

  In recent years, intellectual property (IP) rights have played a pivotal role in the growth of the highly competitive global fashion industry, which generates more than USD 2 trillion per year. Amid breakneck advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs), supply-chain logistics,...

• Intellectual property and e-commerce: Alibaba’s perspective

  E-commerce emerged in China just 25 years ago, in 1993. Two years later, the country’s first e-commerce company was established, and three years after that, in 1998, the first e-commerce transaction took place. From these modest beginnings, China’s e-commerce landscape has evolved beyond...

• Ambush marketing: when sponsors cry “foul”

  Ads bombard us daily – television, billboards, search engines and websites, apps, print and radio. Brands seek ways to break through this noise, to create a buzz and drive consumer demand for their products. In this pursuit, advertisers sometimes invest in sponsoring a big event, a famous...

• Intellectual property and the specificity of sports

  Over the last 40 years, I have been involved in the sports industry and have sometimes noticed sports bodies and athletes peering jealously over a fence. On the other side of that fence are the intellectual property (IP) rights afforded to literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works. Athletes...

• China's commitment to strengthening IP judicial protection and creating a bright future for IP rights
• Protecting traditional knowledge: a grassroots perspective

  Lucy Mulenkei is a member of the Maasai people of Kenya and has been working with Maasai pastoralists for many years, first as a government official, then as a journalist, and for the past 18 years as Executive Director of the Indigenous Information Network. In her current role she works with...

• Innovation: history’s great free lunch

  Innovation as a concept suffers from the paradox of being both overexposed and underappreciated. Countries seek to build innovation economies, regions want to be innovation hubs, companies hope to be seen as innovators, and so on. People certainly see innovation as important and desirable, but they ...