SAN DIEGO (MAY 3, 2015) – As part of its goal to increase its presence and influence in Washington, the International Trademark Association has agreed to work with other IP associations, including the Intellectual Property Owners Association, AIPLA and the American Bar Association IP section, INTA CEO Etienne Sanz de Acedo said in his remarks to open the association’s 2015 Annual Meeting here today.

“We agreed that we would meet on a quarterly basis, share agendas and advocate together,” Sanz de Acedo told attendees. 

The informal partnership was agreed upon at an April 8 meeting between leaders of the associations. 

“Here, we all speak the same language, but public opinion and civil society do not really understand priority, seniority, parallel imports and all these [terms] we’re using. We need to go back to basics,” he said, announcing that a committee on public relations and a committee tasked with providing evidence (including impact studies) to allow INTA to advocate properly are both in the works. “As an IP association, we have two roles: one is being influential, and one is serving our members, and we will only be influential if we can really reach our community, which means judges, legislators, etc.”

INTA also hopes to raise its profile overseas, Sanz de Acedo said.

“We are international in name, but we need to be truly global, and that means we need to reinforce our activities in some regions of the world, including Latin America and Asia, and within Asia, in particular, India, China and the ASEAN countries,” he said. “To do that, we need to interact more with officials, we need to grow our corporate membership in those countries and we need to organize events there, because our role is not only defending brand owners in those regions, it’s also to defend brand owners from those regions elsewhere in the world.”