Introduction to the Research Handbook on the World Intellectual Property Organization – 50 years of the World Intellectual Property Organization

Abstract

Anniversaries provide good opportunities to stop and reflect on what has occurred in the past, as well as speculating on what may happen in the future. In the case of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a significant anniversary occurred on 26 April 2020, which was 50 years from the date on which the WIPO Convention 1967 came into force and the date on which WIPO officially came into existence. The aim of the present volume is to provide a series of critical perspectives on this first half century of institutional life and to provoke discussion on where WIPO may be heading as it enters its second. This is by no means a comprehensive account or history of WIPO in the years 1970–2020: this is a huge task that remains to be done by others and there is a mountain of documentation and other material available to be sifted and examined in detail by future historians. Rather, the perspectives offered here are highly individual and are focused on particular aspects of WIPO and its activities, reflecting a variety of personal experiences and interactions with the organization by contributors with extensive expertise in intellectual property law and policy making. Some of the contributors have worked within WIPO at different stages and have known it at close quarters; others, while strictly outsiders, have had a long history of engagement with the organization and its programmes and governance, often on behalf of their respective governments; others again have been closely involved at different times with particular WIPO initiatives and continue to be so. All contributors, however, have had long experience with the particular areas of IP on which they have written, both at the national and international levels, and bring this knowledge and experience to bear in their assessments of WIPO’s role and impact in these areas. Given the opening caveat that this volume does not purport to cover and examine every aspect of WIPO’s wide range of programmes and activities during its first 50 years, there is a progression in themes that I hope will engage the reader who wishes to learn more about this fascinating organization. Thus, in Chapter 1, I seek to describe the origins of WIPO and to describe briefly the steps by which it came into existence. In this, I have been joined as co-author by Gillian Davies, who was one of the original ‘insiders’. Gillian, who has had a distinguished subsequent career in IP law (with IFPI, the EPO and at the English Bar) served in the United International Bureaux (BIRPI), the predecessor of WIPO, and was closely involved with the negotiations that led ultimately to the adoption of the WIPO Convention at the Stockholm Revision Conference in 1967. As a young lawyer, she worked closely with Georg Bodenhausen and Arpad Bogsch, who successively became the first and