The current global economic crisis is focusing renewed attention on the urgent need to incentivize and protect innovation to both solve the world’s most challenging problems and to generate jobs and economic growth. Intellectual Property (IP), which refers to everything from inventions to the creative arts, drives innovation and improves our lives—generating life saving devices and medicines, discovering new energy and climate-saving technologies, finding novel ways to create and deliver information, and generating consumer goods of all types. IP-intensive industries employ over 18 million Americans, and many of them are in higher-paying jobs and faster-growing fields. Indeed, the nation’s—and the world’s—future economy will be in industries that rely on innovation and strong IP rights. Below are some specific arguments and facts about the importance of fostering effective protection of IP, in particular patent, trademark, and copyright protection and enforcement.

Intellectual Property Creates and Supports High-Paying Jobs

• IP-intensive industries employ over 18 million Americans, and hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
• Jobs in IP-intensive industries are expected to grow faster over the next decade than the national average.
• Manufacturing workers in IP-intensive states earn about $7,000 per year more on average than employees in non-IP ones.
• From 2000-2004, the average worker in an IP-intensive industry earned about 44% more than his counterpart in a non-IP one, while new science and engineering jobs were created at a 28% higher rate in IP-intensive industries than in others.
• The average salary in patent-intensive industries, like pharmaceutical manufacturing companies, exceeds the average manufacturing wage by as much as 62%. 

Intellectual Property Drives Economic Growth and Competitiveness

• America’s IP is worth over $5 trillion, more than the nominal GDP of any other country in the world.
• IP accounts for more than 50% of all U.S. exports, helping drive 40% of U.S. economic growth.
• America is a net exporter of IP, contributing $37 billion to our 2006 trade balance.
• From 2000-2004, a time when overall manufacturing employment dropped by more than 16% in the U.S., pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical manufacturing companies increased their employment by more than 8%. 

Strong and Enforced Intellectual Property Rights Protect Consumers and Families

• Strong IP rights help consumers make an educated choice about the safety, reliability, and effectiveness of their purchases.
• Enforced IP rights ensure products are authentic, and of the high-quality that consumers recognize and expect.
• IP rights foster the confidence and ease of mind that consumers demand and markets rely on.

Intellectual Property Helps Generate Breakthrough Solutions to Global Challenges

• Nearly all of the 300 products on the World Health Organization’s Essential Drug List, which are critical to saving or improving people’s lives around the globe, came from the R&D-intensive pharmaceutical industry that depends on patent protections.
• Innovative agricultural companies are creating new products to help farmers produce more and better products for the world’s hungry while reducing the environmental impact of agriculture.
• IP-driven discoveries in alternative energy and green technologies will help improve energy security and address climate change.

Intellectual Property Rights Encourage Innovation and Reward Entrepreneurs

• Risk and occasional failure are the lifeblood of the innovation economy. IP rights incentivize entrepreneurs to keep pushing for new advances in the face of adversity.
• IP rights facilitate the free flow of information by sharing the protected know-how critical to the original, patented invention. In turn, this process leads to new innovations and improvements on existing ones.
• American’s Founding Fathers so recognized the importance of innovation that strong IP rights for authors and inventors are protected in the U.S. Constitution, thus making America the world’s “idea factory”—a fact borne out by the overwhelming number of patents, copyrights and trademarks filed by the U.S. annually. It is this strong IP protection that brought the USA from the agrarian society it once was to the industrial powerhouse it is today. We must protect this.

Bringing all of these important and diverse points together is the fact that protecting IP is a non-partisan issue that is shared by a broad coalition of interests. These rights are embraced by all sectors of industry—small, medium and large companies alike—and by labor organizations, consumer groups, and other trade associations we bring together.

Please click here  for the printer-friendly version.