April 26 is the day the World Intellectual Property Day is celebrated. The event was first instituted by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), the specialized agency of the United Nations set up in 1967 with the aim of encouraging creative activity and promoting intellectual property protection in the world.  For Patamu this is an opportunity to reflect on issues of copyright and authorship rights, protection from plagiarism, sharing and intellectual property in general.

With the birth and development of digital technologies, production processes, and the fruition and distribution of works have undergone a great deal of change. Over the last decade, the possibilities of diffusion of artworks have multiplied exponentially thanks to the web, a perfect means to share and allow creative works to become known immediately and globally. This has enabled the development of cultural production in ways that were unthinkable before. A more widespread diffusion of works also implies a greater opportunity for contamination and cultural biodiversity: thanks to the web, more and more artists from different countries can compare and share ideas between themselves and participate in collaborative projects.

This edition ot the IP Day is aimed at helping us discover a different interpretation of intellectual property of "supporting innovation by attracting investment,  rewarding creators and encouraging them to develop ideas, and ensuring that the fresh knowledge created be freely available so that the innovators of tomorrow can build on today's technologies".

The Patamu Project has also been working in this direction since it was founded. With Patamu Registry it offers a system for generating a proof of authorship for one's works, with the intent of  allowing authors not to lock them up after having protected them, but to allow them to spread them around more easily, without constraints or fear of being plagiarized.  We are convinced that an author who is more confident about being protected, will be more willing to share and "open" the works instead of locking them up in a drawer.

Confirming the success of this point of view, despite Patamu allows authors to choose freely to license their works either with Creative Commons licensing or with traditional copyright, according to its philosophy of not imposing any constraints, more than half of the 44,000 works already registered on the Patamu platform are released under Creative Commons licenses or other types of free licenses. If you don't know what Creative Commons licenses are, here is a good video that explains it all!

Find more information about the World IP Day 2017 from this link.