Reminder: Urgent Call To Support Intellectual Property Watch

Dear Readers, we at Intellectual Property Watch are writing to politely remind you that the financial support of every one of you is needed this year, especially those of you who have long benefited from our open-access work and have never been asked to contribute. We set a target of end of July, just a few days away. We would like to remind you of the reliable reporting and tough-minded analysis that Intellectual Property Watch brings to a complex area that will certainly continue to be at the centre of global policy and legal debates for years to come, whether your topic is IP law, public health, climate change, food security, trade, internet policy and knowledge access, or innovation.

What Can You Do To Help?

1. Make a one-off 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!

(Note: Paypal account not required)

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.

For more than five 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.

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 – and expand upon – the independent, open-access service that so many of you have come to rely upon, we need your help now.

By next week, we need to make a decision about IP-Watch‘s future and its role as new forces come into play. Some of you have responded already, and we thank you. But we have a long way to go.

We are proud to be a lean enterprise, with a small staff relying on a network of supporting journalists, translators, and other outside contributors, overseen by an expert Board of Directors. 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 some 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 as accessibly as possible. Your suggestions for IP-Watch‘s role in the future are welcome!

Thank you for reading Intellectual Property Watch and for your support!

Help Intellectual Property Watch page