66% of internet users live where political or social sites are blocked, and 78% are in countries where people have been arrested for online posts. New social media regulations have emerged in dozens of countries in the past year alone.
"We worked hard," WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said, adding that the US and Brazil in particular "need more time" to work out their differences over the agreement to impose levies on cross-border online orders.
Before the idea was announced, one of my coworkers, a PR guy, shared the idea-my idea-with the CEO and CMO. While he didn't exactly say he'd done the work himself, how he talked about it made it seem like it was all his.
WIPO is not merely a distant UN bureaucracy; it is a dynamic, fee-driven organization that has been undergoing significant operational and cultural transformation in recent years.
Shelton rejects the romanticized notion of invention as unconstrained creativity. He explains that he is not a fan of "blue sky" brainstorming sessions detached from operational constraints. In his view, unconstrained ideation often produces shallow ideas that collapse under real-world scrutiny. Instead, he deliberately over-constrains the problem. Technical constraints. Regulatory constraints. Cost constraints. Operational bottlenecks. Competitive barriers. Existing prior art. All of it goes into the box.
The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC)-an agency with the extraordinary power to block imports and, in turn, influence the direction of American technology policy-has drifted out of that balance. To align with the Trump Administration's intellectual property priorities and pro-investment agenda, the ITC is in urgent need of reform.
In a recent Tradespace and Above the Law survey, two-thirds of companies that draft patents in-house described IP as a value driver, while 71 percent of companies that outsource drafting viewed IP as a cost. When drafting and prosecution move inside, IP teams work closer to engineers and product leaders. This proximity improves invention quality, strengthens claim strategy, and aligns patent decisions with product direction, market timing, and business priorities.
Yesterday, the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published the results of a joint study detailing the close connection between illicit trade in counterfeits and labor exploitation. The joint study shows clear, repeated associations between the intensity of counterfeit trade and abusive labor conditions, strongly suggesting that such conditions structurally enable the production and distribution of counterfeits.
