WIPO/IP/CONV/GE/2/25
October 28 to October 29, 2025 (Geneva, Switzerland) Hybrid
10:00 - 18:00 Geneva time
Synthetic media – including AI-generated images, videos, audio and text – is rapidly evolving and raising urgent questions for intellectual property and other legal frameworks, while also creating new avenues for creativity. The twelfth session of the WIPO Conversation, "IP and Synthetic Media", took place on October 28–29, 2025, bringing together governments, policymakers, creators, academics and innovators to discuss intellectual property and synthetic media. The session explored the impact of synthetic media on creativity and innovation, highlighting both its potential to democratize creativity and enable new forms of communication, and the challenges it poses, including hyper-realistic deepfakes, digital replicas, and the unauthorized use of works, voices and likenesses without consent. Discussions examined how a global patchwork of existing IP and non-IP legal frameworks seeks to balance protection of rights and address potential abuses, as well as the role of contracts, content moderation, litigation, and technical measures such as watermarks, labelling and traceability mechanisms. The session also addressed the future role of IP laws, noting that while existing frameworks provide a basis for addressing issues related to synthetic media, international collaboration, experience sharing and exchange of best practices remain essential to ensure that the IP system continues to support innovation and creativity.
WIPO/IP/CONV/GE/25
April 23 to April 24, 2025 (Geneva, Switzerland) Hybrid
10:00 - 18:00 Geneva time
Copyright infrastructure, the generally unseen set of organizational systems, processes and technical means that support the implementation of copyright law, is essential to ensure fair protection for creators and copyright owners while allowing for technological innovation to flourish. The rise of generative AI is accelerating the need for a strong copyright infrastructure to ensure that creators are fairly protected while allowing innovation to flourish. As copyright-protected works are increasingly used to train AI models and as AI-generated content becomes more common, the challenges around rights management, attribution, and compensation are growing.||This session explored how different creative industries have developed tailored infrastructure to manage, license, and enforce their rights in the digital environment, and how the development and deployment of AI tools is presenting challenges and opportunities for existing infrastructure. It examined how emerging regulations like opt-out mechanisms and transparency requirements are shaping the landscape and highlighted the importance of building scalable systems that can work across jurisdictions, including for developing countries, and across different creative industries.||The Eleventh session of the WIPO Conversation addressed the role of infrastructure in enabling transparency, consent, and compensation—ensuring the IP system can keep pace with technological change.
WIPO/IP/CONV/GE/2/24
November 5 to November 6, 2024 (Geneva, Switzerland) Hybrid
10:00 - 18:00 Geneva time
The tenth session of the WIPO Conversation “Generative AI: IP and Output” offered a platform for stakeholders to explore these critical issues.||AI is rapidly transforming the creative and innovative industries, driving economic progress while sparking debates about its impact on human creativity. As AI tools become increasingly adept at generating content, the key question is whether AI poses a threat to human creators or serves as a valuable collaborator. The IP field, is grappling with the "output problem"—whether AI-generated content should be eligible for copyright protection. Furthermore, the rise in AI-generated deepfakes has also resulted in broader IP questions around voice and image rights while some experts have even advocated for a new kind of IP right!
WIPO/IP/CONV/GE/24
March 13 to March 14, 2024 (Geneva, Switzerland) Hybrid
10:00 - 18:00 Geneva time
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is accelerating technological progress, revolutionizing industries, and reshaping the way we interact with each other and the information around us. Advances in AI models, especially large language models, and GenAI, are revolutionizing many areas of our lives and proving to be a powerful tool for how we innovate and create.||Training data is central to the success of all current AI systems. The quality of data directly influences the performance and reliability of AI systems across various applications, and access to diverse training data is also one of the important safeguards against AI bias.||A great proportion of the training data currently used by large language models is collected from publicly available sources, for example, by scaping the Internet. The data sets often contain works such as text, images, designs, and music, which are copyright protected.||The ninth session of the WIPO Conversation provided a platform for deep exploration, aiming to understand the multifaceted relationship between training data and IP. By evaluating current practices, proposing practical solutions, and envisioning future directions, this session fostered a holistic understanding of the impact of training data on the IP landscape.
WIPO/IP/CONV/GE/2/23
September 20 to September 21, 2023 (Geneva, Switzerland) Hybrid
10:00 - 18:00 Geneva time
With the ability to create novel and realistic content such as images, music, and even text, GenAI has the potential to revolutionize multiple industries, including creation of music, images, and other forms of content. GenAI impacts innovation and creation and thus raises diverse IP questions, such as how IP can protect AI models, the interrelationship between data input and the questions around IP protection for AI output.||The Eighth Session of the WIPO Conversation sought to bring together all stakeholders to discuss these important issues, to help establish best practices for the protection of creative works in the digital age, and to provide a map for navigating the challenges brought to the copyright system by GenAI.
WIPO/IP/CONV/GE/23
March 29 to March 30, 2023 (Geneva, Switzerland) Hybrid
The Seventh Session of the WIPO Conversation had a look at the wide spectrum of frontier technologies enabling the metaverse, such as AI, blockchain and the NFTs, emerging AR and VR technologies, the Internet of Things and data processing and discussed the challenges the metaverse poses to the existing IP system. It sought to bring together all stakeholders to provide a map for navigating these challenges to ensure innovation continues to grow and develop for the benefit of all.
WIPO/IP/CONV/GE/2/22
September 21 to September 22, 2022 (Geneva, Switzerland) Hybrid
AI inventions present the current patent system with a number of challenges. In order to provide better protection and embrace the full value of patents it is necessary to have timely, transparent and accessible standards for patent granting that market players can fully rely on. To harness the economic potential of AI it is important to understand the uncertainties faced by innovators and for IP Offices to consider how to best support AI innovation.||What are the market trends and how do these translate in terms of patent applications? How autonomous is AI actually, what role does it play either as part of the inventive process or as part of an invention? What questions does this raise for the IP system? And how are IP Offices supporting AI inventors?||The Sixth Session of the WIPO Conversation took place on September 21-22, 2022 and connected the views and stories from innovators and IP professionals to what is happening in the IP Offices around the world and aimed at sharing information and building awareness around patent examination practices, tools and guidelines for AI inventions.
WIPO/IP/CONV/GE/22
April 5 to April 6, 2022 Virtual
The fifth session of the WIPO Conversation on IP and Frontier Technologies looked at the new technologies and assessed their possible uses in IP administration and registration as well as the disruption they may cause to the IP system. It encouraged information sharing across all stakeholders from IPOs to private enterprises and sharing diverse views from IP professionals, innovators, creators and individuals.
WIPO/IP/CONV/GE/21
September 22 to September 23, 2021 Virtual
The world around us is changing rapidly. In the digital age we are all connected, anytime and anywhere. At the heart of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and fueling the change is data. It is unsurprising that data is often referred to as the new oil. And, like oil, data production and refinement can represent a significant investment.||The fourth session of the WIPO Conversation on IP and Frontier Technologies, entitled “Data – Beyond AI in a Fully Interconnected World”, discussed the interaction between IP and Data. There were a mixture of speaker presentations, panel discussions and an open floor allowing all participants to have their views heard by making an intervention.||In this session, the background to the current data debates was discussed, including what data is and why this intangible asset increasingly matters and is changing how we do business, innovate and create. The session also set the scene on some of the key regulatory frameworks for data. Taking all of this into account, the WIPO Conversation asked how data fit into the current IP system and how the IP system can use data.
WIPO/IP/AI/3/GE/20
November 4, 2020 (Geneva, Switzerland) Hybrid
The third session of the WIPO Conversation in November 2020 was dedicated to connection of AI with trademarks and capacity building.