IPR Management

Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) include: copyrights, design rights, patents and trademarks among other IP Rights. IPR Management is often seen as the “legal stream” of Intellectual Capital Management (ICM), while services offered by many IC Centres around the world are more closely related to the “Business Stream” of ICM: however in a well functioning organisation IPR Management is integrated into ICM as part of the business process. The centre of excellence in IPR Management in Asia is the IP Academy of Singapore. Hong Kong SAR is a unique territory in China as it has a long established rule of law tradition (including IP law dating back to 1873) and it operates an IPR regime that is independent of the legal system in mainland China.

The Intellectual Property Department (IPD) is the government unit in charge of administering IPR systems and policies at the HKSAR Government level, while the national level organization for China is The State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) http://www.sipo.gov.cn/sipo_English of the People’s Republic of China. Hong Kong has independent trade representation status in many international organizations and is a member of nearly all of them, except the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO) which, as a United Nations (UN) organization, only recognizes representative offices from sovereign nations. In the case of WIPO, IPD commonly participate as part of the People’s Republic of China’s delegation in cooperation with SIPO and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China.

There are many institutes around the world that offer IPR education, for example the WIPO IP Academy. http://www.wipo.int/academy/en/index.html The IP Academy of Singapore http://www.ipacademy.com.sg/section/home.html was also created on the premises of delivering an IRR management capacity to Singapore. IPR Management Services is commonly offered by law firms that specialise in IPR management. The interests of the “legal stream” and the “business stream” overlap when enterprises wish to exploit the value of their Intellectual Assets (IA).

APICC does not intend to offered legal services that are related to the legal stream of IPR Management, but will work with the legal sector on policy issues relating to how to make best use of Hong Kong’s unique legal systems to help develop the Knowledge Economy in Hong Kong and Mainland China.