In five short years, Intellectual Property Watch has made its mark as the leading independent reporting service on international IP policymaking, respected for its timely and informed content by readers from international organizations, industry, NGOs, civil society, research centres, government, as well as academia. We have provoked debate, exposed controversies, and helped thousands to access a policy conversation long seen as highly technical and closed.

With dramatic shifts occurring in the field of IP and innovation policy and law, our reporting has never been more relevant. But to keep on providing the independent, open-access service that so many of you have come to rely upon, we need your help in the next 3 (THREE!) weeks. By late July, we need to make a decision about IP-Watch‘s future.

We are proud to be a lean enterprise, with a small staff relying on a network of supporting journalists, translators, and other outside contributors. But the time has come for us to ask for your help to address an urgent challenge of finding a sustainable business model that includes maintaining our commitment to making as much content free online as possible, and keeping all of it free to developing country readers.

To sustain our work, our strategy has been to ask developed country readers to take paid subscriptions institutionally or individually. We have also begun offering advertising. And of course we continue to approach potential philanthropic supporters and explore collaborative business models. Meanwhile, we are determined to continue to offer the highest quality content possible.

But these things take time.

What Can You Do To Help?

1. Make a one-off donation of $100-$500 to IP-Watch. We invite all of our readers, from whatever constituency, including academics, who use or have used our resource for free to consider this donation as a ‘thank you’. You can make the donation through our website. Please do this Now!

2. Secure an institutional subscription. If you work for a large organization, IGO, company, government, university or NGO – encourage them to subscribe to Intellectual Property Watch. We can offer workplace-wide license agreements, or other easy, tailor-made arrangements. Again, time is of the essence, so if you would like to help, now is the time! [Contact Catherine Saez for details, or here is a draft letter [doc] to send to your institution]

3. Subscribe yourself to IP-Watch. This helps us with our longer term planning. Every individual subscription counts! If 500 readers subscribe personally, this will already give us a long step toward our yearly budget. [Click here to subscribe.]

4. Make a call, send an email – Make contact with colleagues or acquaintances who may be potential individual philanthropists or have leads into philanthropic organizations or other potential sources. Send an email to wnew at ip-watch.ch with your ideas of potential contacts (and how to reach/approach them) to help put IP-Watch on a long-term sustainable footing. All suggestions and proposals are welcome. Remember, you are all our readers and so you know best who is out there.

Major policy debates lie ahead. Intellectual Property Watch exists to benefit readers like you. To date, most readers have received our services with no charge. We hope now that you will be able to do something to help keep IP-Watch alive.

Thank you for reading Intellectual Property Watch and for your support of our work in reporting on global debates on IP policy!