sports

April 26 is World Intellectual Property Day.

The theme for this year’s World Intellectual Property Day is “IP and Sports”.

Sports are one of the popular fields inseparable from human life.

As legal rights to creations produced as a result of intellectual activities in the fields of economy, science and technology, art and literature and so on, IP rights arouse people’s enthusiasm for creation and play an important role also in promoting the development of the sports field by encouraging people to uninterruptedly develop better technologies and products.

As it has become a global trend for people to purposefully participate in sports activities, a lot of intellectual wealth related to sports is being created and the number of applications for their ownership is on the rise.

For example, various kinds of sports goods, including training equipment, sportswear and trainers to which advanced technologies are applied, and nutritious foods for enhancing sports capacity of sportspersons and relieving their fatigue are all protected by IP rights such as patents and trademark and industrial design rights, thereby spurring people to develop more new cutting-edge technologies.

Meanwhile, as the number of sports fans is increasing around the world with the passage of time, large incomes are earned from the application of copyrights related to sports and their adjacent rights, including live broadcasts on sports games, various kinds of advertisements and video production.

As seen above, sports and IP rights are closely linked with each other.

In the DPRK, too, research and development of sports facilities, sports goods and various kinds of foodstuffs suited to the constitutional features of Korean players has long been conducted positively under the state’s concern.

The Pyongyang Sports Goods Factory, the Kumkhop General Foodstuff Factory for Sportspeople and other similar factories across the country produce various kinds of sports goods and foods to which new technologies and designs protected by IP rights have been applied.

These successes result in many gold medallists in international and domestic games every year and contribute to making sports mass-based and part of everyday life.