By Kelly Anderson (Cross-posted from IP Delivers)

This week is one full of global holidays. Those with green thumbs among us celebrated the importance of protecting our environment on Earth Day. Our friends down under will honor those who served and died in wars, conflicts, and peacekeeping operations today for ANZAC Day. And the IP advocates of the world will be celebrating a holiday of their own this weekend: World IP Day.

Each year, on April 26^th, we commemorate the role intellectual property plays in promoting innovation and creativity, creating jobs, and fostering economic growth. In our last newsletter, we highlighted a Chinese government campaign, Operation Cloud, that was launched to dismantle the manufacturing and distribution of counterfeit medicines, which present a real and present danger to consumers both in China and abroad.

In Pakistan, the government recently renewed its commitment to protecting the IP rights of innovators throughout the country. The Director General of Pakistan’s Intellectual Property Organization (IPO), Aamir Hassan, is working to create a comprehensive strategy to safeguard IP through the creation of a campaign to curb piracy, increase enforcement efforts, and bolster public awareness about the importance of IP. On Saturday, the government will commemorate the importance of those protections with a World IP Day celebration.

Governing bodies elsewhere in the world are helping to uphold the rights of innovators. The European Union (EU) Court of Justice recently ruled that Internet Service Providers can legally block websites that distribute pirated material. The EU court ruling could help significantly curb the proliferation of copyright-infringing material on the Internet, which will help rights holders protect the content they worked hard to develop while also curbing pervasive online piracy.

And it’s not just branches of governments that recognize the importance of IP. On the IP Delivers website, you can hear from innovators and creators around the world who can attest to the ways in which IP is critical to what they do, be it providing a nation’s citizens with clean drinking water, revolutionizing the treatment for life-threatening diseases and allergies, or shaping a country’s film industry.

So, on Saturday, we hope you take a minute to commemorate World IP Day by celebrating the ways that IP fuels innovation, safeguards consumers, and promotes economic growth all around you.