Tag: intellectual property

From the Corner Café to the Global Market: Building an Inclusive Intellectual Property System Across APEC

[from APEC News, by María Gloria Riethmüller Harland, Singapore]

Every day, I pass by small businesses that bring life to our neighborhoods. A corner café with its own blend, a family bakery known for its special recipe, a local designer selling clothes under her own brand. Few of them would think of themselves as intellectual property owners, yet in many ways they are.

Their innovative brands, recipes and ideas are often their most valuable assets. But for most small businesses, intellectual property still feels like something meant for large companies with legal teams.

Over the last two years of chairing the APEC Intellectual Property Rights Experts’ Group (IPEG), one conviction has only grown stronger. Intellectual property should not be a privilege for a few. It should be the foundation that lets anyone with a good idea earn from its expression and grow. It should spark more creativity across our region. It should help build new businesses, new jobs and shared prosperity.

In practice, for a small business owner, the system can feel complex, costly and hard to navigate. The landscape is also changing quickly, as new technologies and online trade reshape how ideas are made, shared and protected.

When IPEG was created in 1997, its focus was making global trade rules on intellectual property work between economies. Over time, its work has grown to place small businesses, along with women, young innovators and local communities, at the center.

Our work over the past two years has been about making that shift real.

Small businesses, big ideas

Micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) account for more than 97 percent of businesses in the APEC region. The challenge is not whether they have valuable ideas, they do. The challenge is turning those ideas into growth.

Intellectual property can help small businesses protect what makes them different, secure finance and expand into new markets with confidence.

The difference can be striking. A study [archived PDF] by IP Australia found that new small businesses that filed for intellectual property in their first year were twice as likely to achieve strong sales and employment growth. Yet the study found that only a small fraction of MSMEs own intellectual property.

That is why small businesses sit at the heart of IPEG’s 2025-2026 Work Plan.

Some of the most valuable lessons came from simply listening. Last year August in Incheon, I moderated our Policy Dialogue on Intellectual Property for Business, with a focus on SMEs. Our conversations were honest and practical, from making the system more user-friendly for small business owners to the opportunities e-commerce opens for them.

Conversations matter, but only if they lead to change. This one did. Following the dialogue, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) offered member economies the opportunity to embark on a project, asking small businesses directly how they understand, use and perceive intellectual property, and what stands in their way. Such projects aim to help offices and policymakers across the region build systems and support around real needs, not assumptions.

When we met in Dalian this August, the progress was clear. Some economies shared how they are running training workshops that help firms, especially technology startups, identify and actively manage their intellectual property strategically. Others are offering support in valuing patents, so small businesses can use their inventions to secure loans.

Step by step, intellectual property is becoming a tool small business owners and innovators can actually use, not just one they hear about.

Keeping pace with technology

Technology is changing how ideas come to a reality and are sold. But it is also changing how we protect those inventions, giving intellectual property offices new tools to work faster, smarter while making systems simpler for business owners.

Take patents, which protect new inventions. To get one, an inventor has to prove their idea is genuinely new. With a record 3.7 million patent applications filed worldwide in 2024, that is no small task.

Artificial intelligence search tools can now help compare applications more thoroughly rather than simple keyword matches. Chatbots walk first-time applicants through the search process. New translation tools make it simpler to understand patents filed across the region.

For a small business, this is far from a technical detail. Faster and more accurate searches mean knowing early whether an idea is genuinely new, before spending money on an application and investing in their venture.

Used well, technology can turn a complex process into a quicker, clearer path to protection.

Every idea counts

But a system is only as strong as the people it reaches.

Women, for example, accounted for just 18 percent [archived PDF] of inventors named in international patent applications in 2024. For the people and communities behind unprotected good inventions, that means missed income, missed recognition and missed growth.

Changing that takes partnership. By enhancing dialogue with APEC’s Policy Partnership on Women and the Economy, IPEG can build women entrepreneurs’ know-how on using intellectual property to protect their brands and designs, helping them to grow internationally.

Every region also has its own valuable cultural or geographical assets, while communities also carry traditions passed down over generations, from recipes and crafts to songs and stories. They are not just part of communities’ heritage and pride. For many, these traditions and assets can become sources of income. Intellectual property plays a vital role here too.

Geographical indications, labels that tie a product’s name to its place of origin, are one way to do that. Across the region, they are helping more small local businesses and women-led enterprises stand out from imitations, reach new buyers and become more competitive.

Copyright is reaching folk art too, from traditional stories to music and designs. Clear rights give communities the confidence to share their traditions widely and give new generations a reason to keep creating with them.

Inclusion is not a side project for intellectual property. It is the test of whether the system works at all. When intellectual property reaches more people, more creations reach the world, benefiting workers, MSMEs, communities and consumers. That simple belief has guided IPEG’s work for the past two years.

In August, I chaired my final IPEG meeting in Dalian. What I value most is not any single outcome, but the spirit behind our work.

IPEG is a space for dialogue. A space to ensure intellectual property drives resilience, innovation and growth. A space where economies with different experiences work together to make intellectual property more meaningful and accessible.

That space matters more than ever. New technologies, new business models and new forms of creativity are creating both opportunities and challenges. I encourage IPEG to keep using this forum not only to exchange information, but to thinking creatively about where APEC cooperation can make more tangible differences.

Because in the end, the measure of our work is simple. It is whether the corner café, the family bakery and the young designer down the street can turn their innovations into a lasting livelihood.

María Gloria Riethmüller is the Chair of the APEC Intellectual Property Rights Experts’ Group (IPEG) and Legal Advisor at the Intellectual Property Department of Chile’s Undersecretariat of International Economic Affairs.

Digitizing Heritage: Exploring the Transformation of Culture to Data

[from India in Transition by the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania, 1 September 2025]

by Krupa Rajangam & Deborah Sutton

“Oh that. We just took some undergraduate history students on board as interns. They provided the content and it was done.”

The co-founder of a digital heritage initiative promoting interactive user interfaces offered these opening remarks. Speaking at a Delhi-based museum, he had been asked about the information provided to users as they moved their hands across an interactive board, revealing images and narratives relating to the Indian freedom movement. His response clarified that the physical and digital components of such installations—for example, the 3D-modeling software and hardware, scanning equipment and its resolution and the user interface—were more carefully designed and calibrated than the content they provided.

Contemporary cultural heritage (CH) is rife with digital innovation. The COVID pandemic accelerated this transformation as archivists and curators worked to develop content that would reach remote, locked-down audiences. Within significant limits, digital platforms can democratize and facilitate access to materials previously inaccessible. Instead of being physically siloed, digitized material—as data components and not just content on culture—can be reproduced, combined, and circulated infinitely to achieve a reach previously considered impossible. Accessibility and malleability remain one of the great boons of digital formats. But here, we consider the information economy of CH practice as it exists—and not its extraordinary and often hypothetical potential—in two, overlapping realms of digitized CH: for-profit business enterprises and academic side-hustles, related to more mainstream academic research.

In the former, questions of what is shared are often less significant than the appeal of the format. In the latter, innovation is often the result of short-term projects that languish, abandoned after project completion, and rarely find audiences. Our research builds on our individual experiences and the findings of a scoping exercise examining a number of India-based heritage projects conducted in 2021-22. It suggests the need for more careful consideration of the implications of transforming CH materials into forms of data; the change impacts everything from how we understand “originality” to the reliance on for-profit services to deliver heritage material to the public.

As digitized representations of CH and access to such formats become more widespread, are we, as CH practitioners and academics, giving enough thought to how digital technologies are reshaping the nature of CH and its audience? Beyond questions of wider reach, are we sufficiently acknowledging how these changes challenge a continued focus on originality and notions of academy as primary controllers of access to knowledge and its validity, both in research and practice?

Digitizing for Dissemination

In 2019, one of us—Deborah Sutton—developed a software platform, Safarnama, including an app and authored experiences around Delhi’s CH. The project subsequently extended to Karachi. Generating “original” content, such as audio-visual clips and old photos, to be hosted on the app platform, was key to its attractiveness and usefulness, but permissions proved tricky. Some collaborators who were initially keen to contribute content quietly withdrew, likely due to the unfamiliar format and unknown reach. The app format also raised other questions. Would incorporating content from non-digital but published scholarship require authorial permission or only acknowledgement?

In 2020, Krupa Rajangam held a sponsored incubation at the NSRCEL, a business incubator located at the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore, to develop a web interface that would host geo-locationed stories of marginalized histories by drawing on both historical facts and lived experiences. Corporate mentors remained skeptical of her ability to source “original” content on an ongoing basis, i.e., content that was both authenticated and validated. They repeatedly advised her to focus on the format, user experience, and appeal for “mass markets” so her prototype would find audiences. Both projects equally raised questions over who would consume the content and what constitutes the public or audience.

In a scoping exercise undertaken for the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), UK, in 2021-22, we explored a number of India-based heritage projects funded by the AHRC in partnership with the Newton Fund and Indian Council for Historical Research, since 2015 (figure 1). We were particularly interested in the digital components, which all projects included, even if only a website.

Our exploratory surveys firmly established the divergence in interpreting both CH and digital technologies, which was not surprising. Some projects defined and treated CH as fixed pre-existing material, to be interpreted and presented to audiences through digital technologies. Others re-framed digital formats of CH as components of data, assembling, manipulating, and representing extant archival and other materials. The rest generated digitized CH, effectively altering its nature. Typically, such projects dealt with more ephemeral or less conventional forms of CH.

Fundamental Transformations

Notions of originality remain central to art, architectural and art historical training, and CH practice. Digitization transforms the access and retrieval value of “original” material in physical archives, such as old maps and letters, much lauded in traditional “analog” scholarship, to use value as data. Once the end-user (audience) accesses this data (whether historical facts or stories), it becomes nothing more than bytes occupying valuable space, to be deleted once consumed rather than stored, making it easy to overlook or disregard the source and its context.

For example, in the Safarnama project, the app contained carefully collected and authenticated narratives on “partition memories” in Delhi and Karachi. However, the bite-sized media format meant that users would only explore content once, as snippets. This realization led the team to develop the software and incorporate the ability to download content, which at least meant that users could collect, organize and store (archive) the assembled media.

Digitization also takes away the materiality of the archive, making it more ephemeral. Non-digital materials through, and into which we render CH can (in endless combinations and cycles) be lost, forgotten, sold, recovered, collected, displayed, and stored. Such capacities of digital files are obvious, but maintaining access depends on varied and dynamic software ecologies for existence and sustained end-user access. Digital files created within one software-architecture can be incompatible with, and therefore rendered obsolete, by another. The ethos of software development is constant change.

In another paper, we examined questions of quantity, quality, and reusability of data related to digitization of building-crafts knowledge alongside CARE and FAIR principles of data management. The principles were proposed and adopted by an international consortium of scholars and industry, the former focused on responsible collection, use, and dissemination of data, especially related to vulnerable people and the latter on sustainable data management.

As an example, one AHRC project experimented with methods to capture detailed 3D images of heritage sites and structures in dynamic crowded environments. They used one set of methods to capture the interiors and another for the exteriors, hoping to merge both together and develop holistic imagery for audiences. This proved impossible at first due to issues of software compatibility. Once that was partially resolved, the new software couldn’t handle the sheer volume of data captured—and it was unclear where and for how long such volumes of data would be stored.

New realms of intellectual property remain fuzzy. While the content on digital platforms is governed by licensing and proprietary legal frameworks, it is often hosted on open platforms, through web repositories such as GitHub. Prima facie, such openness appears to challenge the proprietorial nature of archives and other repositories as keepers of knowledge. However, it raises a host of questions about how to maintain a critical understanding of archives.

Digitization may, and should, transform access but should it obliterate the regimes through which the materials were generated and organized and what’s included or excluded? For example, a local coordinator of one project that engaged with artists commented that digital technologies are typically used to document technical skills as forms of intangible heritage and develop artist encyclopedias, saying that “they are hardly used to interrogate the reality that many ‘traditional’ artists hail from marginalized castes.” Similarly, the local coordinator of another project that engaged with communities living in and around a protected heritage site commented on how digital technologies often end up being used to create a record of heritage structures without any reference to their day-to-day setting.

Any and all digital enterprise in CH, we argue, needs to integrate the ambition to use digital methods to not just present but also counter and interrogate the material, its creation, and purpose. Digital platforms and web- and app-based software are now able to manipulate and re-situate information in unprecedented ways. The novelty of such formats can displace original, provocative, and timely considerations of the material. Often, we are so taken by the visual and structural attributes of these formats, that we accept it at face value and lose sight of the tone and content of heritage as a curated message about the past and the present.

Alongside this, digital augmentations and iterations of CH, including storage, have significant financial and infrastructural implications. The creation and maintenance of digital platforms requires either developing “in-house” digital specialization or, more commonly, reliance on private, for-profit platforms. Paying for external provision introduces complexities. Funders, including the AHRC, struggle to devise guidance or policy in relation to software licensing. However, a persistent challenge to projects, and partnerships between academic and non-academic partners, is devising data and software strategies that subsist beyond the life of the funded-research project. Often, the adverse effects of the paucity of longer-term planning around IP issues, sustainability, and data archiving falls disproportionately on the non-academic stakeholder.

While digitization foregrounds the potential and promise of complete openness and equity, maybe this is lost in practice. Or digitization may merely mark the displacement of one set of ethics with another. There is a need for more careful consideration of the implications, complexities, and risks of taking CH materials out of boxes and off shelves and transforming and generating it into data files, which are, in turn, dependent on digital platforms to provide end-user access. However, the question remains of whether heritage-related disciplines are adequately prepared and willing to confront such new ways of working, which have begun to dislodge some of the privileges extant in current forms of research and practice.

Krupa Rajangam is nearing the end of her tenure as a Fulbright Fellow at the Historic Preservation Department, Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. Her permanent designation is Founder-Director, Saythu…linking people and heritage, a professional conservation collective based in Bangalore, India.

Deborah Sutton is a Professor in Modern South Asian History at Lancaster University.

WANG Huiyao: To Save Global Trade, Start Small

[from the Center for China and Globalization]

by WANG Huiyao (王辉耀), Founder of the Center for China and Globalization

The global economy is being rocked by war, sanctions and spiraling commodity prices—not to mention the ongoing strain of the pandemic, geopolitical tensions and climate change. These compounding risks present a serious challenge to the system of open trade that the World Trade Organization was designed to uphold. But it also offers a chance for the beleaguered organization, which is holding its first ministerial conference since 2017, to prove its continuing relevance.

The WTO has traditionally focused on combating protectionism—measures designed to insulate producers from international competition. Now, though, the biggest threats to free trade come from policies meant to safeguard national security and protect citizens from risks, such as those related to health, the environment or digital spaces.

Former WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy has called this growing use of export controls, cybersecurity laws, investment blacklists, reshoring incentives and the like “precautionism.” It’s been on the rise since the start of the pandemic, when many countries moved to restrict exports of medical supplies and other essentials. COVID-19 has also raised concerns about the vulnerability of supply chains, particularly those dependent on geopolitical rivals.

The world’s two biggest trading nations, the United States and China, have both engaged in precautionism. The U.S. is actively pursuing a policy of “friend-shoring”—shifting trade flows from potentially hostile countries to friendlier ones. China’s “dual circulation” strategy aims in part to reduce dependence on foreign imports, especially technology, while its government has long imposed limits on data flows in and out of the country.

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the momentum toward friend-shoring has grown. Meanwhile, food shortages and surging prices have triggered another round of precautionary measures: Since the war began, 63 countries have imposed a more than 100 export restrictions on fertilizer and foodstuffs.

While the impulse driving such policies is understandable, the trend could cause great harm if allowed to run unchecked. It will increase inflation and depress global growth, especially if it involves costly redeployment of supply chains away from efficient producers such as China. A recent WTO study estimated that decoupling the global economy into “Western” and “Eastern” blocs would wipe out nearly 5% in output, the equivalent of $4 trillion.

As a recent study by the International Monetary Fund points out, the way to make global value chains more resilient is to diversify, not dismantle them. Turning away from open trade will only make states more vulnerable to economic shocks such as war, disease or crop failures.

The WTO is an obvious vehicle to rally collective action on these issues. However, like other global institutions, it has been weakened by years of deadlock. At this week’s meeting, countries should start to build positive momentum with some small but symbolically significant breakthroughs to show the WTO can still mobilize joint action.

Given current threats to food security, at the very least members should agree not to restrict exports of foodstuffs purchased for the World Food Programme. A step further would be a joint statement calling on members to keep trade in food and agricultural products open and avoid imposing unjustified export restrictions. There should also be closer coordination to smooth supply chains and clogged logistics channels.

Another low-hanging fruit is finally securing a  waiver covering intellectual property rights for COVID-19-related products. This proposal has languished for over 18 months but has now been redrafted to address concerns from the U.S. and European Union. Signing it would go some way to expanding global access to vaccines, which are still sorely needed in many parts of the world.

Beyond this week, the WTO secretariat and members need to develop a work program to reform the organization. This should include developing a framework to ensure that if states do take precautionary measures, they do so in a transparent, rules-based manner that does not slide into more harmful forms of protectionism.

Reviving the WTO’s defunct dispute settlement mechanism is a clear priority. Twenty-five members have agreed to an interim arrangement that would function in a similar way. More members should join this agreement, ideally including the U.S., and start negotiating the full restoration of a binding mechanism. They should also set clear criteria for carveouts for legitimate precautionary measures related to national security, healthcare and environmental issues.

No one should expect big breakthroughs in Geneva. But practical agreements on immediate priorities such food security and vaccines would at least help to reassert the WTO’s relevance and show that the world’s trading partners are not simply going to give up on multilateralism. At this dangerous moment, even small victories are welcome.

World Watching: U.S.-China Tariffs

(from the PIIE Insider)

News and Analysis from the Peterson Institute for International Economics
November 13, 2019

They Saved the Worst for Last: Why Trump’s Impending December Tariffs on China Should Be Rolled Back

The terms and deadlines of President Donald Trump’s trade war with China are hard to follow, but one thing is clear: American consumers and businesses should welcome a rollback of impending final rounds of China tariffs as part of a possible “phase 1” deal to be announced later in November, say Mary E. Lovely and Yang Liang. Washington has acted against China to punish it for preventing US access to the Chinese market and for violating US intellectual property rights.  Beijing is reportedly demanding that impending December tariffs be dropped before they sign any deal. Trump says he hasn’t decided how many tariffs might be lifted.

Key Takeaways

Read the full story at PIIE [archived PDF].