Intellectual Property Rights in the Digital Economy

The recent Global legal events have been stressing the importance of Intellectual property rights in the growing digital economy. The need has been more stressed with WTO’s trade related intellectual property rights provisions setting the tone with the rules for all its members covering about 95% of the entire trade between the countries. As the trade between developed countries and developing countries grows with the transfer of technology, the changing economic system offers many Business Opportunities and challenges for Law Firms dealing in intellectual property rights.

Creativity and the innovation of the businesses fuel the modern economies, and such inventions, innovations need proper protection in the form of patents, copyrights, etc so the companies spearheading these inventions can enjoy the fruits of their hard work and capital investment. With such protection in place, organizations can generate high-paying jobs and more employment helping the societies. In one of the USA law events, President Barack Obama emphasized the need for such protection saying; from health care, to education and energy sector innovation is the way to achieve prosperity.

Economic recovery is possible only with these inventions, innovations, and framing of proper intellectual property rights is imperative for protecting the interests of our investors. Intellectual property rights infringement or the copyright infringement has become a major threat to all businesses across the globe negatively affecting these industries such as Publishing, software, music, movies, games, etc their economies, questioning their sustainability in some cases.

A report for the international chamber of commerce puts this violation of copyrights, patents at US $ 215 billion by the end of the year 2015. The rapid technological innovations such as peer-to-peer share networks are facilitating such copyright violations and piracy activities. While music industry is the most affected, television shows are not far behind, the popular television series 5 of "Lost" was the most pirated with more than 2 million pirated downloads, and as soon as the last episode was broadcast on Tv, about 100, 000 people shared a single metadata peer-to peer sharing torrent file to download the episode.

These numbers threaten the innovative spirit and enthusiasm of the modern businesses, as majority of the modern day businesses rely solely on their intellectual capabilities. Technology companies thrive on inventing and licensing their inventions in a bid to protecting their Legal event management. Technology giant, Qualcomm, invested about US$ 12 billion in the year 1985 to achieve a market capitalization of US $ 96 billion by licensing their Event Management Services, purely based on invention, innovation and licensing.

The number of applications for patents has grown manifolds in the recent past. Analysts say, there is a confusion as ot how owns a patent or where to go for a patent, and this is also the reason for growing number of patent applications.

Regulators are facing a huge challenge dealing with these issues, especially in a system with fragmented system that is incompetent and leaves the players in the system frustrated. To protect the interest of the stakeholders, it is imperative to create a system that encourages innovation, creativity, protects the free speech, encourages healthy competition, makes use of the exponential power of the digital technology.

Events 4 Sure is a division of Excellect Kpo Consultants Pvt. Ltd. (Ekpoc) which is an India headquartered company operating in the global legal events industry for the last 8 years.