WIPO

World Intellectual Property Organization, WIPO - was established by a WIPO Convention in 1967, and became a specialized agency of the United Nations in 1974. WIPO is headquartered in Geneva.

Activities

WIPO's purpose is to promote respect for intellectual property worldwide.

Intellectual property comprises two main branches:

  1. industrial property (inventions, trademark and design)
  2. copyrighted materials (literary, musical, photographic, cinematographic and other artistic works).

The work of the WIPO consists of

  • administering international conventions
  • developing international standards
  • promoting modernization of national legislation in the protection of intellectual property
  • collecting and disseminating information
  • organizing meetings and seminars
  • providing legal and administrative support to Member States.

WIPO is working closely with the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Structure

WIPO is governed by a General Conference, composed of all member states, and a General Assembly, composed of state members of the Paris convention (Protetction of industrial property) and Berne Convention (Protection of literary and artistic works).

The highest public servant of the WIPO is the Director-General.

More on WIPO

  • WIPO Library supports your intellectual property (IP) research.

UN documents and publications in catalogues and databases

  • United Nations Digital Library offers UN documents and open access publications, UN voting data and speeches, UN maps, Content in 6+ languages. Replaces the traditional online catalogue UNBISnet.
  • UN iLibrary UN publications online covering different topics.
  • ODS full-text UN documents published from 1993 onward and scanned documents published between 1946 and 1993 in the official languages of the UN.
  • Daily list of documents (ODS). Documents published for the day, with full text links, can be found in the United Nations full text database ODS.
  • UNBIS Thesaurus a multilingual database of the controlled vocabulary used to describe UN documents.
  • Index to proceedings is an annual bibliographic guide to the proceedings and documentation of the major UN organs. The index includes:
    • a list of all documents
    • a comprehensive subject index
    • an index to speeches
    • a voting chart of resolutions
  • United Nations Documents Index (United Nations Digital Library) References to all documents by subject area are published. A collection of indexes is held by the Dag Hammarskjöld and Law Library, Uppsala, and the Libraries at UN Headquarters in New York and Geneva.
Last modified: 2023-11-23