This year’s World Intellectual Property Day campaign – Reach for Gold – takes a closer look inside the world of sports. It explores how innovation, creativity and the IP rights that encourage and protect them support the development of sport and its enjoyment around the world.
The universal values sports encompass – excellence, respect and fair play – power their global appeal. Today, thanks to advances in broadcasting and communications technologies, anyone, anywhere, can follow sporting action around the clock, tracking the performances of their favorite athletes and teams without leaving home.
Sports have become a multi-billion dollar global industry – one that generates investment in facilities (from sports stadia to broadcasting networks), employs millions of people around the world, and entertains many more.
Business relationships built on IP rights help to secure the economic value of sports. This, in turn, stimulates growth of the industry by enabling sporting organizations to finance the events we savor, and by providing the means to promote sports development at the grassroots.
WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation) will find out how trademarks and branding maximize commercial revenue from sponsorship, merchandising and licensing agreements. They will also explore how broadcasting rights underpin the relationship between sport and television and other media that bring fans ever closer to sporting action.
