US involvement in WIPO is key to maximize global innovation.

IP rights have come under attack from a loose coalition of academics, nongovernmental organizations, multilateral groups, and others whose opposition threatens to undermine innovation, growth, and progress on key global challenges.

IP opponents make specious arguments to falsely portray IP as a tool to benefit large corporations and developed countries at the expense of human freedom, the diffusion of ideas, and growth in developing countries.

To maximize global innovation, the international community needs to forge a stronger and more wide-ranging consensus on the importance of IP to every country—developed and developing alike.

Countries with robust IP rights should work together on all fronts to push back against opponents, make the case that IP is central to global progress, and strengthen the international framework of IP rules, norms, and cooperation.

INTRODUCTION

The global economy, including developed and developing nations alike, is becoming more innovation-driven—powered by knowledge, creativity, and technology, each of which is fundamentally supported by intellectual property (IP) and intellectual property rights (IPR) protections. And yet, over the past two decades, the policy debate over IP’s role has come under an increasingly active and coordinated attack, driven by IPR skeptics and opponents hailing from a variety of academic and multilateral institutions, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and some developing nations and policymakers therein. They have done much to advance a false narrative that strong and effective IP is a win-lose, buy-sell proposition, which only helps the developed “North” (as opposed to the underdeveloped “South”).

Yet if the international community is going to maximize global innovation—something that is critical if we are to make faster progress on commonly shared global challenges such as climate change, disease prevention and treatment, and economic growth—we will need a stronger and more wide-ranging consensus on the importance of IP to every country throughout the world. To maximize the role intellectual property can play in enabling innovation across the world, the countries that best recognize the essential link between the two—including the United States, Commonwealth nations, European Union members, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and others—need to revise and amplify efforts to build out and strengthen the international framework of intellectual property rules, norms, and cooperation. A new way ahead is needed to overcome and move beyond the status quo stalemate that defines the intellectual debate over IP in the global economy, which remains starkly and deeply divided along developed-developing country lines that were largely set 20 years ago with the signing of the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement at the World Trade Organization (WTO).