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WIPO Magazine, Issue No. 2, 2002 NUMBER2 Geneva, February 2002 WORK ADVANCES ON GLOBAL ISSUES TRADITIONAL CULTURE IN CHINA TRADEMARKS AND MARKETING WORLD INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ORGANIZATION A Message from the Director General As we begin the new year of 2002, on behalf of WIPO and its staff, I wish to extend our best wishes to all. The start of a new year is a good time for reflecting on the challenges ahead. In the WIPO Millennium Declaration adopted by WIPO’s Policy Advisory Commission, the Commission members stated: “Intellectual property rights are a key and integral tool in efforts to address the fundamental challenge of development for all, which at the end of the twentieth century stands as the most universally important responsibility facing mankind.” One of the greatest challenges that WIPO faces today is the task of making the promise of intellectual property as a tool for economic development a reality. In this 21st Century, intellectual property (IP) is a powerful driver of economic growth. When linked to the development of human capital, it results in educated, skilled and motivated individuals and becomes a dynamic combination in terms of stimulating creativity and innovation, generating revenue, promoting investment, enhancing culture, preventing “brain drain”, and nurturing overall economic health. Despite the importance of IP to wealth creation and economic development, a gap continues to exist between developed and developing nations in terms of IP asset ownership and use. This is not be- cause of an inherent lack of creativity or innovation but mainly because of a lack of information about IP and its potential as a tool for economic growth. If all nations and their leaders integrate strategic intellectual property policies into their wealth creation plans, the current gap between knowledge- asset-based powers and others can shrink in a few decades. In developed countries there is also a lack of understanding in certain sectors of how IP promotes wealth creation. Although some businesses effectively wield the “IP tool”, others, especially small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) may not have the information necessary to do so. For this reason, WIPO will continue the campaign it launched last year to demystify IP and make it more accessible to all. WIPO will address how IP works in practice, how it promotes investment and affects valuation, how inventions relate to research policies, how cultural industries can be supported by IP policies, how trademarks relate to branding and licensing, how IP asset development can be incentivized, how IP assets are managed, how licensing operates to share knowledge and spread the value of IP, how IP can be protected, and other matters of great interest to policy and business leaders. This is an important part of WIPO’s mission and will be integrated in all that we do as we move forward into 2002. WIPO will soon be publishing a book on IP and its relationship to economic development. Written for non-experts, and based on success stories of IP drawn from many nations, it is entitled: “Intellectual Property — A Power Tool for Economic Growth — A Road Map from the Rhetoric of Universal Commitment to the Reality of Universal Achievement”. An abstract of the book is available on the WIPO website at www.wipo.int, via the “Message from the Director General” page. The challenges ahead for WIPO are exciting ones. The Organization’s success in meeting them will depend upon full participation of its members, as well as civil society groups, academic institutions, businesses and citizens. 1 Table of Contents WIPO Magazine/February 2002 WIPO Magazine/February 2 w Developments in Multilingual Domain Names 4 w Work Advances on New Global Issues 4 w 100,000th PCT Application Filed 5 w Efforts to Harmonize Trademark Law Move Ahead 6 w Domain Name Cases at the Arbitration Center 7 w Promoting Intellectual Property in Public Administrations 8 w Protection of Traditional Culture in China 9 w Book Review The Internet Treaties 10 w IP and Business The Role of Trademarks in Marketing 12 w Developing Geographical Indications in Brazil 14 w Calendar of Meetings 15 w New Publications 16 w Conference on the International Patent System Geneva, February 2002 Coca-Cola design on cover and above : Courtesy of Coca-Cola Company 2 DEVELOPMENTS IN MULTILINGUAL DOMAIN NAMES WIPO Magazine/February 2002 WIPO Magazine/February Estimates indicate that by 2003 cybersquatters. “We are keen on two-thirds of all Internet users will ensuring that the expansion does be non-English speakers; however, not happen at the expense of any a significant barrier remains for one party,” he said. many of these potential users as Internet domain names are in a re- Problems Faced in a stricted set of Latin characters, most Multilingual System commonly used to write English. “Native speakers of Arabic, Chi- The Domain Name System (DNS) nese, Japanese, Korean, Tamil, Thai serves to facilitate users’ ability to and other languages are at a disad- navigate the Internet by mapping vantage,” said ITU Deputy Secre- the user-friendly domain name to A symposium organized jointly by tary-General Roberto Blois. “The its corresponding numeric Internet the International Telecommunica- global nature of the Internet makes Protocol address. A domain name tion Union (ITU) and WIPO in as- international dialogue critical if a registration, whether in a generic sociation with the Multilingual universal solution to the problem is top-level domain (gTLD) or a coun- Internet Names Consortium (MINC) to be found.” try code top-level domain (ccTLD), reviewed the technical, legal and provides a global presence which policy issues relating to enlarge- WIPO Assistant Director General ensures that the corresponding ment of the domain name space to Francis Gurry further emphasized online address is accessible online support scripts of languages using this point. “Equality of access to the from anywhere. Some 100 million non-Latin characters. Meeting in valuable resources provided by the such names are already stored in Geneva in December, symposium Internet is an issue of critical im- the DNS, according to industry es- participants – drawn from the portance to the international com- timates. Internet and legal communities, as munity,” he said, “and is a key con- well as policy-makers and govern- cern for international intergovern- While the process of “internation- ment representatives – also dis- mental organizations, such as ITU alization” of the Internet’s DNS is cussed the intellectual property and WIPO.” Mr. Gurry noted that underway, a number of problems implications of such developments. while expansion of the domain need to be overcome to ensure that name space means greater oppor- all linguistic systems are fairly rep- tunities for legitimate users, it also resented on the Internet. The chal- opens up new opportunities for lenges are complex and go far be- yond technical considerations. These include: w administrative arrangements for multilingual domains, w competition policy, w market access, w intellectual property and dispute resolution mechanisms, w cultural and social issues. 3 WIPO Magazine/February 2002 WIPO Magazine/February A number of commercial and pri- vate organizations have proposed solutions that would enable multi- lingual domain name use, but no de facto or technical standards that would guarantee interoperability have yet emerged from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The result is a risk of confusion in the marketplace among Internet users and providers. As Mr. Blois noted, “We do not want to run the risk of fracturing access to the Internet and as a result increasing the digital di- The joint ITU/WIPO symposium vide between developed and devel- aimed to bring about a wider un- oping nations.” derstanding of the many issues raised by the implementation of Key Challenge: Protecting multilingual Internet names. “We Intellectual Property welcome an orderly expansion of the domain name system which The symposium provided a forum more accurately reflects the linguis- in which a diversity of views and tic diversity of the offline world and perspectives could be shared and is done in a way that preserves the future directions could be ex- rights of intellectual property own- plored. By looking at existing chal- ers,” said Mr. Gurry. Mr. Blois noted lenges faced on a daily basis by in- that this activity is part of a broader tellectual property holders and ad- objective, “the true international- ministrators in protecting trade- ization of the Internet.” marks in our multilingual world, experts in intellectual property and ¨ Internet technology shared experi- ences that may lead to a greater un- derstanding of the issues raised by an increasingly internationalized domain name space. Key among those issues is the critical challenge faced by enterprises in protecting their intellectual property in a mul- tilingual world, both on and offline, and the need for effective dispute resolution to resolve the domain name conflicts that inevitably arise. 4 WORK ADVANCES ON 100,000TH PCT NEW GLOBAL ISSUES APPLICATION FILED WIPO Magazine/February 2002 WIPO Magazine/February The IGC also discussed interim re- The Patent Cooperation Treaty ports on traditional knowledge and (PCT) set a new record last year folklore that used empirical infor- when the 100,000th international mation provided by states to de- patent application filed under the scribe the extent to which the tra- Treaty was received at WIPO in ditional intellectual property sys- December. In the PCT’s 23-year
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