For almost two decades, the 26thh of April has been marked as World Intellectual Property Day, to remind us how much trademarks, patents and other non-tangible guarantees of product ownership for inventors has helped the advancement of contemporary society.
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) started with this observance in 2000, with the hope that it would make us all more conscious of the need to protect the rights of the creators who come up with the solutions that take society into an ever more efficient and convenient future. The day coincides with the anniversary of that organization’s founding in 1970.
In Nigeria, discussions around intellectual property rights never seem to lose their relevance. Piracy plagues large swathes of the country’s creative and industrial sectors; stakeholders in these spheres lament almost ceaselessly about the harm inflicted on them by counterfeiters, who flood the market with fake versions of their wares.
This year’s observance (themed Faster, Stronger, Higher) shines the spotlight on sports. While this sector doesn’t seem to be as hard hit as book publishing, music production, or movie making, it has a significant piracy problem too. The giant sportswear brands struggle- and fail –to stave off cheap but illegal replicas of their merchandise. Think the mass production of the official jerseys of Nigeria’s national football teams, for a recent example.
Still, we aren’t racking our brains about ‘ambush advertisers’ running marketing campaigns for sports competition they aren’t sponsoring. These issues may rear their heads once in a while; but in this corner of the globe, they’re dwarfed by a much bigger threat to intellectual property. That threat is the internet, the modern wild west of creativity where rules aren’t necessarily the biggest considerations on the minds of its several billion natives.
Intellectual Property on the Web
The internet has overtaken copycat CDs and pirated textbooks as the new frontier of the fight to safeguard intellectual property. Artists may win against cartels trucking fake CDs on the streets of Lagos or Onitsha, but they have a much bigger challenge when its faceless people uploading their songs on the web as freely accessible mp3 files.
Something else makes this foe more formidable than anything that’s come before it. The internet isn’t just a tool. It’s part of an evolving global culture. In fact, it’s the principal driver of globalization, the means by which the new earth-wide way of life is being propagated. And it’s spun a pushback against the very idea of Intellectual Property.
Back when the WIPO began marking the World Intellectual Property Day, it was the rule that using the product of other people’s sweat without their permission was immoral. Thanks to the internet, a large fraction of the world’s population doesn’t think this anymore.
A lot of the dissent comes from people of a generation that has grown up with freely accessible digital tools, free-to-download audio and video, and other supposed wonders of the internet which make it hard to preserve intellectual property. They think of patents as restrictive and oppressive and prefer that the web remains a bastion of their right to build with bricks made by others.
The Future of Intellectual Property
The future is taking a radically different shape from what the WIPO and its supporters envisioned. It does appear that, at least on the internet, the war to preserve perfect Intellectual Property rights may be near impossible to win. Online news outlets and artists’ guilds continue to plead with the internet’s gatekeepers to punish those who infringe on their rights to the content they create, but they aren’t being heard as much as they want to be.
The music industry is already adjusting to this reality. Artistes now turn to live shows and endorsements for revenues and release their own songs online for free listening and viewing. Many other industries are still trying to figure out a way to live with the internet gobbling up their work. They may have to either find that path or be disrupted into oblivion.
Beyond the screens of digital devices, WIPO continues to advocate for a world in which inventors hold the key to their own work. The encroachment of the web on more aspects of the once ‘offline’ enclaves of our lives may mean that they- and all of us –will have to settle for something of a compromise: a future in which inventions are not thought of as the work of individuals or small groups, but as part of the flow of human ingenuity, coursing its way deeper into a ‘shared’ future.
This might irk a lot of creatives. But they can still sneer at the ‘shared future’ idea and persist with staking a claim to their Intellectual Property. As long as it’s something the law approves of or encourages us to do, we can assert our rights over what we produce.
Featured image source: wipo.int