The strategies that businesses use to enforce it, the legislation which governs it, the value that people put on it and even definitions of what constitutes intellectual property are changing all the time. In the past 12 months, significant legislation in major jurisdictions around the world has altered the landscape for businesses and lawyers alike, while the continued increase in importance of the Internet for brand owners and consumers means that any annual publication runs the risk of being out of date as soon as it is published.


So why do it? Well, the World IP Review Annual 2012 boasts several advantages. For one, it provides an expansive look at what the past 12 months have meant for IP around the world, encompassing developments across continents and laying out pointers for the year to come. The writers have, for the most part, taken a wider view of the issues in their industries or jurisdictions, looking at themes and trends rather than focusing on specific, temporary issues.


An annual publication can also provide a snapshot of a moment in time. What are people concerned about at this particular moment? How has this changed from previous times? A look at annuals past confirms the suspicion


that for, many, IP priorities have changed markedly over recent years.


At the forefront of those changes is the pervasiveness of the Internet. Even five years ago, brands would have been unable to predict quite how important it would become to their commerce, and equally difficult to foresee accurately would have been the scale of infringement opportunities available online. As one of the last bastions of ‘free’ public space, the Internet has much going for it from a user’s point of view, but there are times when that freedom rubs up against understandable commercial desires to limit and circumscribe the ways in which people interact online.


Te struggles of the music industry, for example, to come up with wholly satisfactory models for disseminating music online, while protecting the IP (and revenue) that underpins it, are widely known. Depending on whom you talk to, mass piracy of music may be the fault of the pirates, the Internet service providers (ISPs), or even the music labels themselves. But whoever is ultimately at fault for the situation, it is certainly true that while each individual consumer of pirated material can, and should, make the choice not to do it, solving the


problem will require action on a rather larger scale. And that means IP owners.


Most of the IP issues that brands and other IP owners face across the Internet contain aspects of the same problem. Brands appearing on social media platforms rely on the users of those media to play by the rules, and the platforms themselves to looks out for the IP owners’ interests. But without a real incentive for users, or indeed knowledge of the gravity of IP infringement, brands end up having to do the work themselves.


Similarly with counterfeit products sold online. While the panacea would be to tackle demand, through educating consumers and providing legitimate channels that negated the desire for counterfeits, in practice, brands and law enforcement have to deal with the infringements as they crop up. In the World IP Review Annual 2012, several articles look at different aspects of this dynamic, and we consider the wider context of new top-level domains, online advertising and tools to monitor a company’s assets online.


Of course, although the online environment is occupying the attention of many brands these days, it’s not the only concern. Indeed, it is still a relatively rare company whose IP assets


36 www.worldipreview.com


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