World Intellectual Property Day 2024 is on Friday, April 26, 2024: Loss of intellectual property-Software?

Friday, April 26, 2024 is World Intellectual Property Day 2024.

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When you purchase a software some money going to the author-developer of the software as copyright fee.

That is what companies mean with loss of intellectual property, even it's not actually this.

Indellectual property still remain in authors / company name, just author-developer and distribute companies loose part of profits, and that is what they call "loss of intellectuall property"

Been on media for over twenty year ,I found out one thing. As time pass, more and more developers of software join the GNU public licence community, (wich means offer their software to the public for free, and the code of software to other developers also for free)

or they distribute their programs from free or threw donations from their own websites.

Why then in above to cases we don't have loss of intellectual property, and we have loss of intellectual property only when we download illegally software without pay the fee?

The answer is money. Companies lose profits,and this is something they don't like and to make people more sceptical about it, they put it behind the name "loss of intellectual property" which actually it isn't.

Example: From 1985, millions of copies of DOS or windows operating systems were installed illegaly. Microsoft though never had loss of intellectual property, and Gates was the richest person in the world. Just microsoft lose more profits.

Have a nice day

Write a Sample notice for " World Book Day"?

April 23 marks the anniversary of the birth or death of a range of well-known writers, including Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Maurice Druon, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Haldor Kiljan Laxness, Manuel Mejía Vallejo, Vladimir Nabokov, Josep Pla and William Shakespeare. For this reason, UNESCO's General Conference chose this date to pay tribute to books, the authors who wrote them, and the copyright laws that protect them.

What do people do?

A range of activities to promote reading and the cultural aspects of books are held all over the world. Many of these emphasize international cooperation or friendships between countries. Events include: relay readings of books and plays; the distribution of bookmarks; the announcement of the winners of literary competitions; and actions to promote the understanding of laws on copyright and the protection of authors' intellectual property.

In some years, the Children's and Young People's Literature in the Service of Tolerance is awarded. This is a prize for novels, collections of short stories or picture books that promote tolerance, peace, mutual understanding and respect for other peoples and cultures. There are two categories: one for books aimed at children aged up to 12 years; and one for those aimed at young people aged 13 to 18 years.

Purpose of the day

World Book and Copyright Day is an occasion to pay a worldwide tribute to books and authors and to encourage people to discover the pleasure of reading. It is hoped that this will lead to the renewed respect for those who have made irreplaceable contributions to social and cultural progress. In some years, the UNESCO Prize for Children's and Young People's Literature in the Service of Tolerance is awarded. It is also hoped that World Book and Copyright Day will increase people's understanding of and adherence to copyright laws and other measures to protect intellectual copyright.

Background

The year 1995 was named the United Nations Year for Tolerance and UNESCO's General Conference, held in Paris, concentrated on this theme. The delegates voted to establish an annual occasion to carry the message of tolerance into the future, in the form of a day to celebrate books, authors and the laws that protect them. The date was chosen because April 23 marks the anniversary of the birth or death of a range of internationally renowned writers and because of the Catalan traditions surrounding this day. In Catalonia, a region of Spain, April 23 is known as La Diada de Sant Jordi (St George's Day) and it is traditional for sweethearts to exchange books and roses. World Book and Copyright Day has been held annually since 1995.

Symbols

Each year a poster is designed and distributed around the world. It features images designed to encourage people, particularly children, to read books and appreciate literature. There is also a logo for World Book and Copyright Day. It features a circle, representing the world, and two books, one of which is open.

Evaluate the significance of The World Trade Organization to international trade.?

The World Trade Organization (WTO), ( is an international organization designed to supervise and liberalize international trade. The WTO came into being on January 1, 1995, and is the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which was created in 1947, and continued to operate for almost five decades as a de facto international organization. WTO deals with the rules of trade between nations at a near-global level; it is responsible for negotiating and implementing new trade agreements, and is in charge of policing member countries' adherence to all the WTO agreements, signed by the bulk of the world's trading nations and ratified in their parliaments.Most of the WTO's current work comes from the 1986-94 negotiations called the Uruguay Round, and earlier negotiations under the GATT. The organization is currently the host to new negotiations, under the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) launched in 2001.The WTO is governed by a Ministerial Conference, which meets every two years; a General Council, which implements the conference's policy decisions and is responsible for day-to-day administration; and a director-general, who is appointed by the Ministerial Conference. The WTO's headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland.

The GATT still exists as the WTO's umbrella treaty for trade in goods, updated as a result of the Uruguay Round negotiations (a distinction is made between GATT 1994, the updated parts of GATT, and GATT 1947, the original agreement which is still the heart of GATT 1994).[13] The GATT 1994 is not however the only legally binding agreement included in the Final Act; a long list of about 60 agreements, annexes, decisions and understandings was adopted. In fact, the agreements fall into a simple structure with six main parts:

an umbrella agreement (the Agreement Establishing the WTO);

agreements for each of the three broad areas of trade that the WTO covers: goods and investment (the Multilateral Agreements on Trade in Goods including the GATT 1994 and the TRIMS), services (GATS), and intellectual property (TRIPS); dispute settlement (DSU); and

reviews of governments' trade policies (TPRM).The WTO launched the current round of negotiations, the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) or Doha Round, at the Fourth Ministerial Conference in Doha, Qatar in November 2001. The Doha round was to be an ambitious effort to make globalisation more inclusive and help the world's poor, particularly by slashing barriers and subsidies in farming. The initial agenda comprised both further trade liberalization and new rule-making, underpinned by commitments to strengthen substantially assistance to developing countries.The talks have been highly contentious and agreement has not been reached, despite the intense negotiations at Fifth Ministerial Conference in Cancún in 2003 and at the Sixth Ministerial Conference in Hong Kong on December 13 - 18, 2005. On July 24, 2006, at the end of yet another futile gathering of trade ministers in Geneva, Pascal Lamy, the WTO's Director-General, formally suspended the negotiations. Nevertheless, in his report to the WTO General Council on February 7, 2007, Lamy said that "political conditions are now more favorable for the conclusion of the Round than they have been for a long time". He then added that "political leaders around the world clearly want us to get fully back to business, although we in turn need their continuing commitment".

The WTO is too often misunderstood, sometimes genuinely, often wilfully. We need to put our case better. We also have to listen to our critics more. They are not always wrong. At the moment, we are working on a package to help the world's poorest countries reap greater benefits from the world trading system. This package includes better access to rich-country markets, increased technical assistance, and closer co-operation between the WTO and other global institutions that promote development, notably the World Bank. And we are trying to make the WTO's work even more accessible to the man and woman in the street. We are constantly improving our website, www.wto.org, so that it offers an even greater wealth of information.

WTO's mandate of opening up markets represents an essential contribution to the development of so many human beings on our planet. Favouring sustainable development strategies that take into consideration the individual and collective interests of all will contribute to humanising globalization.

The impact of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), established in 1995, has gone largely unnoticed by the majority of politicians, NGOs and citizens. Trade, however, is an important aspect of the current wave of globalisation and its influence is felt from the global level to peoples' daily practices.

The WTO replaced the better known GATT (General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade) which was itself a far cry from the originally planned International Trade Organisation (ITO). The ITO was to be created after the second World War as the third pillar of the Bretton Woods system and was meant to take an integrated approach to many trade related matters: securing full employment, reducing tariffs which stand in the way of economic growth, protecting workers' rights, preventing undue domination and manipulation by big companies (competition policy), assisting weaker economies in gaining access to capital and technology, and managing commodity trade.

The WTO was established with a far more limited mission:

enforcing the trade contracts negotiated in the Uruguay Round (1986-1994) among the member countries (132 by end September 1997), and

continuing negotiations on trade and investment rules and liberalisation of trade in agricultural and manufactured goods, the services sector (e.g. consultancies, tourism) and investment.

But many of the matters the Ministerial Conference, the highest decision-making body of the WTO, had to contend with at its initial meeting in Singapore in December 1996 were ITO issues left out of the WTO: passionate discussions on whether the WTO should deal with labour rights; calls for technical and financial assistance for the least developed countries (LLDCs); and new WTO discussion groups on the issues of competition policy and multilateral investment rules.

As in the draft ITO, the WTO has to cooperate with the World Bank and the IMF 'with a view to achieving greater coherence in global economic policy-making'. Cooperation agreements between the WTO, the World Bank and the IMF have been signed but there is no high level macro-economic co-ordinating mechanism to deal with debt, trade imbalances and budget deficits - all obstacles to weaker economies benefiting from world trade. Co-operation seems to occur mostly at the operational and country level such as exchanging information and expertise at meetings and among officials (e.g. on balance of payment problems of a particular country). Recently, the World Bank and the IMF have been involved in efforts to coordinate technical assistance for each of the LLDCs (see below). Such co-operation increases the danger of joint conditionality towards total free trade in developing countries.

The ministers at their Conference in Singapore envisaged 'a world where trade flows freely'. The WTO is considered instrumental for furthering globalisation, a process which the ministers and trade officials claim has the capacity to increase economic growth and employment... and 'help put a telephone in every village - something that can make the difference between life and death' (WTO Director General's opening speech in Singapore).The preamble of the WTO states that trade relations should contribute to raising standards of living, ensuring full employment, increasing income, and expanding production and trade while respecting the environment and the different needs of the member countries at different levels of economic development. But the WTO has no instruments to advance or assess its concrete contribution to these objectives:

The Singapore Ministerial Conference only reviewed how countries were able (or not, as was the case for many least developed countries) to apply the new WTO rules, not how many jobs were created, or lost, or how to deal with negative effects on developing countries.

The Ministers declared that respect of basic labour rights was the domain of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and not the WTO. They did not commit to making WTO rules environmentally friendly. They had no means for addressing concerns of developing countries.

New agreements are being pushed through, such as on liberalising information technology products, in the interest of the US and the EU on the assumption that cheaper prices increase economic growth, without an assessment of the impact on employment and on developing countries.

The WTO's Trade Policy Review Mechanism (TPRM) does not evaluate the impact of its rules on workers, consumers, peoples lives and sustainable development. TPRM is biased towards ensuring implementation of WTO rules, trade liberalisation and enhancing trade. In 1997, the ICFTU produced parallel reports on the link between trade, trade policy, repression of labour rights and gender discrimination, but discussion of these findings was dismissed by the TPRM Committee. Furthermore, trade policy-makers and WTO staff lack the capacity and interest to incorporate gender analysis in the TPRM.

The WTO's basic assumption is that its rules contribute to trade and investment liberalisation which leads to more competition, better allocation of resources, economic growth, more employment and better living standards, including environmental conservation. Although the WTO, and GATT in the past, have incorporated special measures for weaker economies, there are many pitfalls in the current system.

The WTO considers the distribution of the benefits of trade to be not a matter for the WTO but for each country individually. Many facts and figures show, however, that the current global economic and trade system incorporates an unequal distribution of benefits. UNCTAD reports calculated how liberalisation and globalisation not only widen the gap between rich and poor countries but also increase income inequality within countries:

inequalities between skilled and unskilled workers are growing in the North as well as in the South; corporate restructuring, labour shedding and wage repression are on the rise;

profit shares and the return on capital has risen much more (from 12.5% in the early 1980s to 16% in the mid 1990s in G7 countries ) than wages in manufacturing;

the concentration of national income and higher company profits have not been invested so as to create more jobs;

the benefits of liberalisation have been mainly reaped by traders rather than by farmers who have not received better prices for their export crops relative to border prices.

These distributional problems cannot be revealed by trade information covering country and product statistics and government (free) trade policies. Trade figures need to give information on the actual trade operators, the companies, especially those which have been pushing for globalisation and lobbying hard for the Uruguay Round to finish. These multinationals cover most of the world's commodity trade, investment and intellectual property rights (see TRIPs below). 40% of world trade concerns trade within multinationals and around a third of world trade relates to trade among multinationals. More information on workers, consumers and companies might help the WTO meet its original aims.

At the Singapore Ministerial conference many euphoric statements were made about the achievements of globalisation and the WTO's contribution to this process. Globalisation is not only the result of technical innovations, capital concentration, the geographic spread of production processes and other company strategies to improve profit-making worldwide 24 hours a day. Political decisions by governments to remove institutional barriers to international trade and capital flows and to provide incentives for companies have also supported the globalisation process: at national level through unilateral liberalisation and structural adjustment for export-led growth, and through labour and social policy reform; at regional and multilateral levels, through agreements on trade and investment liberalisation.

The WTO is the most important regulator of trade at international level and also sets the terms within which regional agreements can be signed. In this way, globalisation is managed at world level from a trade perspective.

The significance of the WTO for globalisation is that more than 130 countries must jointly open up their economies to each other and abide by common rules making it easier to trade and invest. The WTO also brings a wide range of economic sectors into the ambit of the global economy.

WTO members have to implement a series of agreements and obligations which they negotiated in the Uruguay Round:

the agreement on trade in goods:

tariff cuts and liberalisation of industrial products;

liberalisation of textile and clothing imports in the industrialised countries over 10 years;

reform of trade and domestic policies in agriculture with some reduction in government export subsidies;

prohibition of conditionality on investment measures that restrict trade (Trade Related Investment Measures-TRIMs);

tightened rules on subsidies, safeguard measures (which allow a country to halt imports if an industry is in danger) and anti-dumping (against sales below production cost).

the agreement on trade in services (GATS):

a series of obligations such as making information on laws that concern services easily accessible (transparency);

market access and application of the GATS obligations to foreign companies in the service sectors selected by a given country from a list.

the agreement on trade related intellectual property rights (TRIPs): inforcement in all WTO member countries, during a specified period, of copyrights, trademarks, industrial designs, patents, trade secrets, etc. registered in one of the member countries.

The WTO continues to broaden its reach as a forum for continuing negotiations on liberalisation and rule-making. Many of the above agreements included the timing for new negotiations: Agreements were reached in Singapore to eliminate duties on information technology products (e.g. computers, fax machines) and to give an additional 400 pharmaceutical products duty free access in some countries.

Negotiations to liberalise trade in basic telecommunications were concluded early 1997. Further liberalisation of financial services (e.g. banking, insurance companies) is to be decided by the end of 1997.

New WTO working groups are exploring future multilateral agreements on investment and competition policy.

Art. 27.3 (b) of the TRIPs agreement, providing for exceptions on patenting of life forms, has to be reviewed by the end of 1998. Further market reform of farm trade and production is due to start by the end of 1999. The Singapore Ministerial Conference decided on a preparatory 'exchange of information' in the meanwhile. New negotiations on services (GATS) and TRIMs must begin by 1 January 2000.

The WTO makes an important contribution to globalisation by covering so many sectors and allowing greater interaction of national economies, foreign direct investment and capital markets.

The WTO is a small governance system where we already have a few elements in place: we have a multilateral system that recognizes different values, including a consensus on the benefits resulting from market opening, but also other values such as the need to respect religion or the right to protect the environment and it is now clearly recognized that non-trade values can supersede trade considerations in some circumstances. We have a system that is based on state and government but which has been able to adapt to take into account new actors on the international scene; and we have a system that has a powerful mechanism to solve disputes.

But the international trade system and the WTO are far from being perfect and many things could be improved. For the opening up of markets to produce real benefits in the everyday lives in the countries concerned we need rules that provide for a level playing field, that ensure capacity building, and that enable Members to improve their domestic governance.

But while the opening up of markets stimulated by the WTO has the potential to produce benefits for many, it also has its costs, whose distribution is largely beyond the WTO's control.

We cannot ignore the costs of adjustment, particularly for the developing countries, and the problems that can arise with the opening up of markets. These adjustments must not be relegated to the future: they must be an integral part of the opening-up agenda. We must create a new “Geneva consensus”: a new basis for the opening up of trade that takes into account the resultant cost of adjustment. Trade opening is necessary, but it is not sufficient in itself. It also implies assistance: to help the least-developed countries to build up their stocks and therefore adequate productive and logistical capacity; to increase their capacity to negotiate and to implement the commitments undertaken in the international trading system; and to deal with the imbalances created between winners and losers from trade opening — imbalances that are the more dangerous to the more fragile economies, societies or countries. Building the capacity they need to take advantage of open markets or helping developing countries to adjust is now part of our common global agenda.

Part of this challenge falls under the WTO; but the WTO's core role is trade opening, we lack the institutional capacity to formulate and lead development strategies. The challenge to humanise globalization necessarily involves other actors in the international scene: IMF/WB and the United Nations family.