Marketing IP with feminism
Mako found an amazing thing: the WIPO page on Women and Intellectual Property. (Actually, it looks like Greg Pomerantz found it and Mako wrote about it.)
I wish someone would start a blog or a site that collects examples of how copyrights and patents are marketed to various communities. Some of my favorite examples involve the government of Taiwan making a big effort to impress the U.S. Trade Representative and the overseas direct investment community with a series of copyright education campaigns. Of course, the Taiwanese approach to copyright education is not something that makes a lot of sense in American culture; the government hired people to create a bunch of cartoon characters, songs, slogans, and even dances in honor of copyright, and then held enormous public parties in which celebrities demonstrated all of these things and painted respect for copyright as one's patriotic duty as a modern Taiwanese citizen. (A lot of that material is no longer on-line, which is a real shame. But you can probably deduce from first principles most of what it looked like... if the Taiwanese government's copyright education campaigns did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent them.)
Another classic is the WIPO children's cartoons, which feature a multi-ethnic group of young children in a series of adventures involving copyrights, patents, and trademarks. In each case, one of the children has some kind of amazing talent (as a graphic artist or musician, as an inventor, or as a small business entrepreneur), tries to pursue it, is mocked by the unsympathetic and uncool adult world, is threated with exploitative behavior from the shady world of pirates, and then is suddenly informed about the relevant flavor of IP rights in somewhat excruciating detail by a young person. Good triumphs in the end as the newly-informed kid is able to use one or another kind of IP to put the piratical villains in their place and become a successful artist, inventor, or business person.
In general, you can have an interesting time by poking around the web sites of some law enforcement agencies, treaty organizations, etc., and trying to find their "For Kids" sections. They almost always have some kind of cartoon or game dedicated to putting a positive light on the organization's activity. It's an amazing genre.
