WIPO is an international organization dedicated to promoting creativity and innovation by ensuring that the rights of creators and owners of IP are protected worldwide, and that inventors and authors are recognized and rewarded for their ingenuity.
As a specialized agency of the United Nations, WIPO provides a forum for its member states (+123 countries) to create and harmonize rules and practices for protecting IP rights. Most developed countries have implemented systems that are very old, while developing countries continue to create administrative and legal frameworks to protect their trademarks, patents, designs and copyright. WIPO assists its member states in developing these new systems through legal and technical assistance, treaty negociations, and training in various forms, including in the area of enforcement of Intellectual Property rights.
WIPO provides a forum for its member states to create and harmonize rules and practices for protecting Intellectual Property rights. WIPO also provides international registration systems for industrial designs and appellations of origin, trademarks, and an international filing system for patents. These systems greatly simplify the process of seeking intellectual property protection simultaneously in a large number of countries.
Instead of having to file separate national applications, in different languages, in each country in which protection is sought, applicants can file a single application, in one language, with a single application fee.
The WIPO – administered systems include four different mechanisms of protection for specific industrial property rights, like the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) System, for filing patent applications in multiple countries, the Hague System for the International Registration of Industrial Designs, The Lisbon System for the International Registration of Appelations of Origin, and the Madrid System for the International Registration of Marks, for trade and service marks.
Anyone applying for a patent or registering a trademark or design, whether at the national or international level, needs to determine whether their creation is new or already owned or claimed by someone else. To do this, huge amounts of information must be searched.
Four WIPO treaties have created classification systems that organize information on different branches of industrial property into indexed, manageable structures for easy retrieval. They are: The Strasbourg Agreement Concerning the International Patent Classification; the Nice Agreement Concerning the International Classification of Goods and Services for the Purposes of the Registration of Marks; the Locarno Agreement Establishing an International Classification for Industrial Designs; the Vienna Agreement Establishing an International Classificatuion of the Figurative Elements of Marks.
The WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center provides services for the resolution of international intellectual property disputes between private parties. Such proceedings can include contractual disputes (such as patent and software licenses, trademark coexistence agreements, and research and development agreements) and non-contractual disputes (such as patent infingement).
The Center is also recognized as the leading dispute resolution service provider for disputes arising from the abusive registration and use of Internet domain names.
Source: WIPO
