Industrial property includes inventions (patents), trademarks, industrial designs, and geographic indications of source. Copyright includes literary and artistic works such as novels, poems and plays, films, musical works, artistic works such as drawings, paintings, photographs, and sculptures, and architectural designs.

Rights related to copyright include those of performing artists in their performances, producers of phonograms in their recordings, and those of broadcasters in their radio and television programs.

Although most people are aware of intellectual property, many still view these as business or legal concepts with little relevance to their own lives. To address this gap, the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO) Member States decided in 2000 to designate an annual World Intellectual Property Day. They chose April 26, the date on which the Convention establishing WIPO originally entered into force in 1970.

Eight years after the first observance, the awareness of the meaning and importance of intellectual property has increased. There is now a growing recognition that protecting intellectual property would advance the rights of individuals and peoples across the world, especially as this will encourage scholars to pursue systematic research, artists to exercise their creativity in varied genres, and communicators to project human achievement and capture important events through various media.

As expressed by leaders of the WIPO, on World Intellectual Property Day, we are celebrating not only the enormous power of human creativity, but also the intellectual property rights that help to fuel and channel it, making it an important driving force for economic, cultural, and social development.

As the ingenuity of our species has propelled us from the invention of the first wheel, to effortless air travel and the latest generation of clean fuel technologies, as well as the expansion of knowledge dissemination through the Internet, the World Intellectual Property Office calls on the world’s peoples to commit to harness and spread the power of human creativity and innovation by protecting intellectual property rights.