The impact of intellectual property and IP rights are being more widely felt under the strain of IP theft from China, the war in the Ukraine, the challenge of increasing diversity and new digital assets, such as crypto currencies and NFTs.
Take-aways from the 5th Intellectual Property Awareness Summit held by the Center for Intellectual Property Understanding confirm these trends.
IPAS 2022 was held in conjunction with Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and the Institute for Business Innovation on April 5th.
Major take-aways include:
- Clear IP rights for the most part help creators and new businesses, including minority entrepreneurs.
- The disconnect between awareness of IP rights true understanding is due in large part to the relentless ‘troll’ narrative promoted by some technology businesses and the media.
- Zeal on the part of U.S. companies to access the vast Asian market for their products, especially China, has helped to encourage an IP rights ‘give-away’, including patents and trade secrets. Counterfeits are an additional challenge.
- “Technology leadership drives economic leadership which also drives national security issues [David Teece]”
- The war in the Ukraine [and lack of transparency in China] has caused a paradigm shift… The global [economic] system is a thing of the past and nations are trying to figure out how they can cooperate in a peaceful and productive way.
- “IP rights are not only a creator issue, they are an investor issue.”
- There is a wide diversity of opinion among IP professionals as to the benefits and dangers of blockchain and digital assets that are stored on them, like crypto currencies and NFTs. It is still unclear to many that they are IP-positive.
- Digital assets on a distributed ledger are being seen by more creators, brands and financial institutions as inevitable and not necessarily adverse to IP rights.
Videos by Panel and Speaker
Individual videos of the four IPAS panels and featured speakers, Entrepreneur of the Year, Tiffany Norwood, and Hollywood producer, author and copyright advocate, Jonathan Taplin, are available on CIPU’s YouTube channel.
Go here for the full IPAS 2022 agenda and back ground.
Image source: CIPU: understandingip.org
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