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17 - The Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights in a Digital Era

from Part III - Impact of Knowledge Flows on Trade and Development

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2022

Antony Taubman
Affiliation:
World Trade Organization
Jayashree Watal
Affiliation:
World Trade Organization
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Summary

While the recent diffusion of broadband Internet access has significantly improved the productivity of users, it has also made it hard to enforce intellectual property for digital goods like movies and music. Internet access makes it easy for users to infringe digital content and has undermined the property rights of creators. We first provide evidence and review methods adopted by researchers to quantify the revenue losses in these industries and outline the challenges in quantifying these numbers. We then discuss how poor enforcement of intellectual property undermines creators’ incentives to create the goods and innovation, hurting society’s broader wellbeing. We review current research in this space and discuss the respective roles of government, rights holders, ISPs and platforms in enforcing the rights. The role can be demand side (where demand of infringing goods is reduced) or supply side (where supply of infringing content is reduced). We outline the short-term and long-term effectiveness of various policies and stakeholders in different counties.

Type
Chapter
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Trade in Knowledge
Intellectual Property, Trade and Development in a Transformed Global Economy
, pp. 498 - 530
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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