On Wednesday afternoon, 9 July 2025, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) delivered the following general statement on model laws at the Sixty-Sixth Series of Meetings of the Assemblies of the Member States of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
While 2024 witnessed the birth of two new WIPO treaties, namely the 1) WIPO Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge and 2) the Design Law treaty, in other areas, countries are divided on norms, or not prepared to enter into binding norms when technologies and business models are rapidly changing.
In the past, WIPO published a number of model laws on different types of intellectual property rights. The modalities for developing these model laws were diverse, and in particular.
We request the WIPO Secretariat to provide a document that provides the history of this period of developing model laws, as well as providing reflections on the impact of the model laws.