Innovate/Activate

About the event: Intellectual property regimes seek to benefit society through a variety of incentives, from improving access to encouraging innovation to preserving public knowledge. However, evidence has been building to suggest that there are substantial flaws in the design and implementation of various IP regimes, leading to failures in policy and harms to the public. As a result, active communities have formed to address these shortcomings and the important issues they raise, such as the tension between free speech and efforts to expand copyright’s scope and enforcement tools; the importance of fair use and follow-on creativity; the role of alternative licensing systems such as Creative Commons or the GNU Public License; the appropriateness of patent protection for software and business methods; and the conflict between overpatenting of pharmaceuticals and broad access to medicines and diagnostic technologies. But there’s much more that can be done.

Innovate / Activate is about sharing, discussing, and reexamining our approaches to improving global welfare through identifying new and existing IP-related activism efforts, developing strategies for overcoming IP obstacles, and delivering practical solutions to spur change.