RIO DE JANEIRO (OCTOBER 11, 2015) – Felipe Claro, president of AIPPI, urged attendees of the AIPPI World Congress here to “better explain to the outside world” what IP is all about – and why it is important. 

“This is probably due to, among other things, that a lot of IP has been reduced to just vibrations that fly through the air: books, games, music, videos, they all travel directly through the air to our smartphones,” said Claro, who is a partner who leads the intellectual property practice group at Claro & Cia in Santiago, Chile.

“Education is important in this respect, and we should start at home, at an early age – the younger the better. Developing children’s IP awareness activities is very important,” he said, noting that AIPPI is coordinating efforts among different stakeholders to create this sort of educational product. 

“AIPPI is shaping IP. We have been doing that for almost 120 years, and plan to continue doing so over the centuries,” he said.

Elizabeth Kasznar Fekete, president of AIPPI’s Brazilian group and senior partner at Kasznar Leonardos Intellectual Property in São Paulo, told the audience at the event’s opening ceremony, that Brazil offers business opportunities in a multitude of fields, including infrastructure, logistics, IT, energy, construction, transportation and biotechnology. 

Kasznar Fekete said that the Brazilian AIPPI group had commissioned a study showing, among other things, that industries which are more intensive in knowledge and IP are five times more productive than the less intensive one. 

“The increase of knowledge intensity in the Brazilian economy creates conditions which are more favourable for economic development and for a more sustainable growth,” she said. “As the ninth-largest economy and the fourth-largest democracy in the world, with huge cities, with an ever-growing consumer market in its continental-sized territory, Brazil is a land of opportunities.”