Last Thursday marked the first World Intellectual Property Day. April 26 is the date the World Intellectual Property Organisation came into being in 1970. The Geneva-based UN agency counts 177 nations as members and is in the business of promoting the use and protection of works of the human spirit. WIPO has taken centre stage partly because of the growth in counterfeit goods, such as computer games, videos of latest blockbusters such as Julia Roberts's new film The Mexican , music CDs and clothes. Piracy accounts for up to 7 per cent of global trade.
Protection is the only means by which to curtail it.
The US music industry last week blamed the growth in illegal recordings and Internet downloading as one reason for the first drop in music profits. It means that stars such as Metallica, who sued the Internet music provider Napster, and former Spice Girl Emma Bunton, despite her new single reaching No 1 last week, can expect smaller profits if the piracy goes unchecked. Another major contributory factor has been the IT revolution, resulting in the downloading of software, music, images and text via the Net. Experts agree that the understanding of intellectual property has moved beyond the conversations of those who knew and understood it first. These are the things that Coca-Cola discovered more than 100 years ago when it created a certain logo on a certain bottle for a certain drink.