Intellectual Property Enforcement
Government Action and Private-Sector Involvement
The digital environment is, at its core, an economy of intellectual property. Digitalization of goods, services, data, ideas, and conversations creates intrinsically new assets, often built on or derived from assets for which there are existing protections. The application of intellectual property rules to the digital environment are therefore essential to enabling creators to be rewarded for their work. Lack of intellectual property enforcement in the digital environment, by contrast, threatens to destabilize rule-of-law norms, with severe effects on jobs and economic growth. Undermining respect for rule-of-law values impacts a range of other policy goals affected by the Internet. Criminal…
