Asia-Pacific Conference in Sydney to Tackle a Range of Intellectual Property Issues

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01 Oct: 0823 | As brand owners and trademark professionals face new opportunities and challenges in the Asia-Pacific region and elsewhere, the International Trademark Association (INTA) will be holding an educational conference in Sydney, Australia, from October 11 to 12, to explore timely issues that extend beyond those focused only on trademarks.

INTA’s 2018 Asia-Pacific Conference: Looking Beyond Trademarks—Protecting and Leveraging Your Brands for Growth is designed to help attendees stay ahead of the curve and will address a broad range of topics that impact brand value in today’s market. Attendees will include brand owners, in-house counsel, law firm practitioners, trademark professionals, and government officials.

Among the timely topics are establishing an online presence in China—home to the world’s largest online retail market, balancing intellectual property rights and regulatory restrictions, anticounterfeiting, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and enforcement issues such as ambush marketing and changes to the WHOIS domain name database in light of recent data privacy regulations.

Louise Baxter, Chief Executive and Executive Director of the Starlight Children’s Foundation will be the keynote speaker. For 35 years, the charitable organization’s programs have helped more than 60 million critically, chronically, and terminally ill or injured children in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In 2015 Ms. Baxter was named the Not-for-Profit Executive of the Year by CEO Magazine.

As part of INTA’s own CSR efforts, the Association is asking attendees upon registration to make a voluntary donation to Indigenous Community Volunteers, an Australian nonprofit community development organization that provides opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to develop human and community capacity.

“In the past year, INTA nearly doubled our engagements with government officials in the region while advocating for the development of strong brands and robust trademark enforcement,” said INTA CEO Etienne Sanz de Acedo. “The Asia-Pacific Conference offers an unparalleled opportunity to look at intellectual property and related issues through local, regional, and global lenses, and to develop skills and knowledge about critical topics that affect brands in today’s changing landscape.”

INTA’s Asia-Pacific Conference is just one of its major upcoming events in the region. INTA’s 142nd Annual Meeting—the world’s largest trademark event—will take place in Singapore, April 25- 29, 2020, at the Marina Bay Sands. This marks the second time INTA will be bringing its Annual Meeting to Asia and the first time to the Southeast Asia region. INTA’s activities come at a time of tremendous interest in the region from an economic growth perspective, including the contribution of trademark-intensive industries.

An INTA-released impact study entitled The Economic Contribution of Trademark-Intensive Industries in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand found that across trademark-intensive industries within the five countries, direct contribution to gross domestic product (GDP) varied between 17 percent and 50 percent, indirect contribution to GDP ranged from 40 percent to 60 percent, and workers’ share of the workforce ranged from 13 percent to 29 percent of total employment.

To learn more about the Asia-Pacific Conference and to register, visit https://www.inta.org/2018sydney.