Unlocking the Future: Moot Court Competition on Intellectual Property Law 2026 edition

Intellectual property (IP) law governs the legal rights attached to creations of the mind — inventions, literary and artistic works, designs, symbols, and confidential business information. Its modern international architecture took shape in the late nineteenth century with the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property (1883) and the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886), which established core principles of national treatment and minimum standards of protection. These instruments were later consolidated under the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), established in 1967, which now administers more than two dozen treaties covering patents, trademarks, copyright, industrial designs, and geographical indications. The centre of gravity shifted in 1994 when the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), annexed to the Marrakesh Agreement establishing the World Trade Organization, linked IP protection to the global trading system and made it enforceable through WTO dispute settlement. TRIPS sparked sustained controversy — most visibly over access to affordable medicines, leading to the 2001 Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health and the 2003 waiver enabling compulsory licensing for exports. Parallel debates have surrounded the protection of traditional knowledge, genetic resources, and folklore, culminating in the 2024 WIPO Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge. Today the field faces unprecedented disruption. Generative artificial intelligence raises unresolved questions of authorship, inventorship, and training-data use, as seen in cases such as Thaler v. Perlmutter in the United States and the DABUS patent applications litigated across multiple jurisdictions. Geopolitical tensions over technology transfer, semiconductor patents, and trade-secret theft have intensified, particularly between the United States and China, while the European Union's Unified Patent Court (operational since June 2023) marks the most significant institutional reform in decades. Developing states continue to press for flexibilities that balance innovation incentives against public-interest objectives in health, education, climate technology, and digital access.