26 April – World Intellectual Property Day

World IP Day is an opportunity to highlight the role that IP rights, such as patents, trademarks, industrial designs, and copyright), play in encouraging innovation and creativity. A balanced IP system recognizes and rewards inventors and creators for their work and ensures that society benefits from their creativity and ingenuity.

IP rights provide the means by which researchers, inventors, businesses, designers, artists, and others can legally protect their innovative and creative outputs and secure an economic return from them.

But the IP system is no free lunch. Only when a work meets certain established criteria will it qualify for IP protection. A song, or a movie, for example, only qualifies for copyright protection if it is original. Similarly, a technology has to be groundbreaking (i.e. novel, non-obvious, and useful) to qualify for a patent. Moreover, to obtain a patent, an inventor is obliged to make details of her invention public so that others can build on the technology (Source: WIPO)