Message from Director General Francis Gurry
| Author | Francis Gurry |
| Position | Director General |
| Pages | 1-1 |
World Intellectual Property Day is an opportunity to
celebrate the contribution that intellectual property
makes to innovation and cultural creation – and
the immense good that these two social phenomena
bring to the world.
It is an opportunity to create greater understanding
about the role of intellectual property as a balancing
mechanism between the competing interests which
surround innovation and cultural creation: the
interests of the individual creator and those of
society; the interests of the producer and those of the
consumer; the interest in encouraging innovation
and creation, and the interest in sharing the benets
that derive from them.
is year the theme of World IP Day is visionary
innovators – people whose innovations transform
our lives. eir impact is enormous. ey can, at
times, change the way society operates.
Take the Chinese innovator, Cai Lun. He laid the
foundations for the manufacturing of paper – a
technology that transformed everything, because
it enabled the recording of knowledge. en there
was the invention of moveable type. is was
taken up in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg with
his invention of the printing press, which in turn
enabled the dissemination and democratization of
knowledge. In our own lifetimes we have witnessed
the migration of content to digital format, and the
great distributional power for creative works that
has been brought about by the Internet and the
development of the World Wide Web – for whom we
have to thank, among others, Tim Berners Lee.
Behind many extraordinary innovations there are
extraordinary human stories. At a time when there
were few female scientists, Marie Curie Sklodowska
had to struggle to establish herself as a scientist in
her own right as opposed to the wife of a scientist.
She also struggled as an immigrant working in
another community. Her desire to understand
led to the fundamental discoveries for which she
was awarded two Nobel prizes in two separate
disciplines – in physics and in chemistry – the only
person ever to have achieved this.
In the arts, innovation revolves around new ways
of seeing things. A visionary artist or a composer
or a writer is able to show us a dierent way, a new
way of looking at the world. Bob Dylan, for example:
he captured what was in the air and transformed
several genres of music, essentially bending the
genres of folk and rock music. Or consider architects
– like Zaha Hadid or Norman Foster – who are
transforming urban landscapes, and beautifying our
existence in new ways, while at the same time taking
into account the need to preserve the environment.
We are dependent upon innovation to move forward.
Without innovation we would remain in the same
condition as a human species that we are in now.
Yet inventions or innovations – in the health eld
for example – are of relatively little value to society
unless they can be used and shared. is is the
great policy dilemma. On the one hand, the cost of
innovation in modern medicine is enormous. On the
other hand, the need for compassion, and the need
for sharing useful innovations, is also enormous.
I believe we should look upon intellectual property
as an empowering mechanism to address these
challenges.
But we have to get the balances right, and that is
why it is so important to talk about intellectual
property. On this World Intellectual Property Day
I would encourage young people in particular to
join in the discussion, because intellectual property
is, by denition, about change, about the new. It is
about achieving the transformations that we want
to achieve in society.
World Intellectual Property Day – April 26
Message from Director General
Francis Gurry
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