Support IP-Watch: An Appeal To Readers

Intellectual Property Watch needs your financial support. As one of our readers, you know that IP-Watch plays a vital role in international policymaking on intellectual property and innovation through its independent, reliable, balanced and dedicated news coverage. But like other online news services around the world, the challenges of financial sustainability are high. Please help us continue our unique combination of high-quality reporting available as widely and freely as possible. Please read on to see how you can donate, subscribe or complement your existing subscription to Intellectual Property Watch.

For more than ten 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, and academia. We have informed and provoked debate, debunked myths and exposed controversies, and helped thousands to access a policy conversation long seen as highly technical and closed. But now, just as the need for such reporting on international IP policymaking is greater than ever, Intellectual Property Watch needs both immediate help and longer-term commitments toward sustainable financial support.

Intellectual Property Watch exists to benefit readers like you. We are proud to be an essential and trusted tool in developing strategy for governments, companies, NGOs and academics alike. Whether your topic is IP law, public health, climate change, food security, trade, internet policy and knowledge access, or innovation, Intellectual Property Watch brings reliable reporting, transparency, and tough-minded analysis to a complex area that will continue to be at the centre of global policy and legal debates for years to come. We are the only source that does not subject you to unreliably one-sided or inaccurate analysis, or the growing cheap attention-getting headlines that are the trend today.

But to keep on providing – and expand upon – the independent, accessible service that so many of you have come to rely upon, we need your help now.

We are proud to be a lean enterprise, with a small staff relying on a network of supporting journalists, translators, and other outside contributors. We are also a non-profit news service. Our business model combines income from grants, subscriptions and marketing. To date, we have relied upon the generous support of key donors from the philanthropic sector and governments to sustain our commitment to ensuring the highest quality content possible available as widely and freely as possible on-line. In particular, we aim to keep all of our content free for more developing country readers. As we continue our search for new sources of grants and other philanthropic support, we need also to ask for help from you – our readers.

What Can You Do To Help?

1. Donate through IP-Watch’s new General Support Fund. We invite donations from intergovernmental organizations, national governments, private companies, industry associations, non-profit organizations, philanthropic organizations, research centres, universities and individuals. The size of donations is at your discretion, from US$100 to US$50,000. Donors to the General Support Fund have no influence over Intellectual Property Watch’s editorial policy, reporting or other activities and agree not to attempt to exert such influence or any other editorial interference. Donations to the fund are considered unrestricted and can be used at the discretion of the Board of IP-Watch. For more information on the Fund and how to make a donation, click here [pdf].

2. Make a one-off online donation of $100-$500 (or whatever you can afford) to IP-Watch. We invite all of our readers, from whatever constituency, 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!

3. Ensure your organization has 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, if you would like to help, now is the time! Contact us for details at info@ip-watch.ch, or use this draft letter [pdf] to send to your institution.

4. Subscribe yourself to IP-Watch. IP-Watch subscriptions are at extremely competitive rates for the value provided, and we offer varying rates for different kinds of subscribers. If you have not already subscribed, and to access all of our content, please subscribe now. [Click here to subscribe]

5. Subscription-‘plus.’ New and renewing subscribers can add an additional amount of their choice to their subscription (from $100 to $10,000).

6. Make a grant. If you are a philanthropic or government institution, please consider making a multi-year grant to Intellectual Property Watch. We would be pleased to share our funding proposal and also to discuss ways of tailoring the proposal to focus on specific aspects of our work (translation into Spanish, French, Arabic and Chinese, support for freelance journalists in developing countries, etc).

7. 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 info@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. Remember, you are all our readers and so you know best who is out there.

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

Recent testimonial about IP-Watch from a government delegate:

You and your team deserve all the “kind words” in the world. You guys are heroes, you do an outstanding job! I never cease to admire how your staff manages always to understand the gist of any debate, however complex or arcane.

Whenever I want to understand anything better in the world of IP, I do research on your website to find out what you yourself or your collaborators wrote about it.

I believe your colleagues must be here, watching these very moving testimonies of blind people on the importance of the Marrakesh Treaty. This is something I will not forget.