At UN’s Wipo, Singaporean Daren Tang strives to create an equal music for haves and have-nots

Shortly after he took over as director-general of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (Wipo) five years ago – the first Singaporean to head a major UN agency – an ambassador from an African nation had this to say to Mr Daren Tang.

“The problem with intellectual property, DG,” he told the former government lawyer, “is that it is too intellectual.”

The 53-year-old Mr Tang, who in an earlier career avatar had been involved in some of the trickiest trade negotiations on behalf of Singapore, took the message to heart.

In the five years he has helmed Wipo, he has worked to reduce the “cheem” (“difficult to understand” in Singlish) factor in intellectual property (IP) and bring it closer to the ground – something that accompanies people in their daily lives.

“I wanted to make IP relevant to not just 1 per cent of the world, but also for the remaining 99 per cent,” he tells The Straits Times. “Of course, IP is a legal right, but it is also about technology, about branding, music, arts and culture. IP should support those innovating and creating, wherever they are in the world.”

The world’s surface rumblings latterly may be all about rising protectionist instincts, particularly in its biggest economy. But below that is unprecedented innovation as the human capacity to imagine and invent and share soars like never before. 

Every minute, more than 40 IP applications are filed somewhere in the world. Since 2018, over 20 million applications have been made each year, including more than 23 million in 2023. These days, seven in 10 of those IP applications are from Asia, Africa and Latin America – up from 50 per cent from these regions a decade ago.

This trend will only increase as investments in intangible assets – think brands such as Yakun and Gojek or SIA’s golden bird and sarong kebaya – grow nearly four times faster than investments in tangible assets.

Indeed, 87 per cent of the value of companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 is in intangibles. A third of all patents registered are in digital and related technologies.

The US, says Mr Tang, remains the “pre-eminent innovation engine” because it is the best in commercialising ideas.

It is bringing protection to the IP that resides in this burst of innovation and discovery that the Geneva-based Mr Tang presides over, helped by a 1,700-member staff. Wipo, which he has run since 2020, has 194 members – one more than the UN itself. In contrast, the trade-focused World Trade Organisation has 166 members. 

Last week, Singapore nominated Mr Tang for another six-year term starting 2026. If no other country nominates a candidate of its own by the end of October, Mr Tang could be returned unopposed. Otherwise, the nominations go to a vote. In 2020, Mr Tang was elected to the job 55-28, prevailing over a Chinese candidate in the second round, from an initial field of six.

The value to Singapore in keeping Mr Tang in his post is to continue demonstrating how a small country such as itself can remain relevant to the world in concrete ways.

An Equal Music

As a law student in the early 1990s, Mr Tang, a jazz pianist trained by the famed Jeremy Monteiro, was the ivory-thumper in Mr Eddie Chan’s Thomson Jazz Club, and he sometimes made extra cash by playing gigs at places such as Tanglin Club.

Today, he strives to create an equal music for both the haves and have-nots through IP, which had been used in the past sometimes as a vehicle to empower the privileged.

One example is UnBalivable – a project Wipo concluded in 2024 in Bali where, working with the local Indonesian authorities, it mentored 25 Balinese handicraft makers and artisans in creating their own brands.

One such brand, Macha – a maker of cushion and pillow covers using Balinese designs and fabric – subsequently graduated from being a “white label” supplier to stores in Australia and New Zealand, to being a branded supplier of heritage products with a shop in Switzerland operated through a franchisee.

Over the course of Mr Tang’s tenure, 620,000 have been trained in IP through the Wipo Academy, as it moved beyond focusing on training IP lawyers and professionals and towards providing practical skills to creators, founders and small business owners, thus widening its reach. 

Registering and protecting IP, says Mr Tang, is only the first part of the value-creation journey. If you do not commercialise it – turn it into a product or service – that IP has got little value. At the country level, therefore, it is about economic outcomes and employment. IP, ultimately, should be shaped as a tool for growth and development.

“If you ask me, this is probably the most satisfying (part of my work), emotionally.”

The challenging part is that in this era of immense geopolitical churn, consensus – Wipo moves on all members agreeing – tends to be more and more elusive. Nevertheless, the Singaporean has over his term managed to get two hugely contentious treaties passed.

The first is the Wipo Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge (GRATK), which was adopted in 2024 after a quarter-century of negotiations. 

It adjusts patent rules such that when a patent application is made based on traditional knowledge, the application has to disclose it – a move meant to protect the rights of indigenous people and local communities, and one that signals a good balance in the IP system between technology and innovation on the one hand, and heritage and culture on the other hand.

The classic example of what the GRATK tries to avoid is situations where plant or medicinal products known for a long time become patented, such as India’s neem plant.

The other agreement, also adopted in 2024 and after 20 years of negotiations, is the Riyadh Design Law Treaty that harmonises design protection – whether it be the shape of a bottle or the contours of your latest BYD car – across Wipo member nations.

The creative works of Singapore’s SK Jewellery or Greece’s Ilias LALAoUNIS are what the Riyadh treaty would protect.

“This is classic UN agency work, you know, getting people to come together and sit down and negotiate and find consensus to cross the finishing line together,” says the NUS and Georgetown-educated Mr Tang. “Both treaties were adopted by consensus. We do not like things to go to a vote because it destroys the atmosphere and the mood (around the room).”

An issue I have often grappled with intellectually is the morality around IP, especially when it comes to life-saving drugs and treatments.

In 2019, for instance, when Novartis released Zolgensma, a gene-therapy miracle drug for treating spinal muscular atrophy – a rare disease that manifests usually in childhood – the single-shot drug was priced at US$2.1 million. 

Novartis had bought the company that developed the drug for almost US$9 billion, the acquisition price factoring in the cost of bringing the drug to market. But even so, the drug’s price seemed to me to exceed value-based thresholds, and I inquired of Mr Tang where he stood on the issue.

Mr Tang notes that these issues are a matter of balance. Not just pharma, but a lot of research and development proceeds on the basis that the vast sums extended for the purpose – often futilely – sometimes result in a new discovery that turns a huge profit.

“Without IP, there would not be this powerful incentive to innovate, and the IP system functions to connect those with ideas with the market and society.”

Latterly, IP issues have been involving not just “hard” areas such as drug research or jewellery design, but also creative spaces such as music.

A Wipo project Mr Tang initiated is Clip, short for Creators Learn IP, in collaboration with Music Rights Awareness Association, a non-governmental organisation. One person who works closely with him on Clip is Bjorn Ulvaeus, star of the sensational Swedish rock group Abba and author of the group’s biggest hit, Dancing Queen. 

Mr Ulvaeus, now 80, devotes his time to ensuring that creators are duly credited and compensated for their work.

“Being a successful musician today means that you need to know enough technology, enough IP and enough data to take care of yourself, and Clip seeks to help in that,” says Mr Tang. “We try to be the UN agency that is not just for IP, but for innovation and creativity as well. Clip is free, and the website is in all the six UN languages, as well as Portuguese.”

What about the next stage of creativity, when machines create art and music and poetry?

Mr Tang points out that technology has always been part of creative expression, especially in music. When it comes to music, an earlier era brought the drum machines and synthesisers – think Kraftwerk’s 1978 hit The Robots, or Bernard Sumner’s group New Order in the early 1980s.

The new trend is digital technology driving changes in creative expression – video games, for instance, are an example of technology blending with heritage and culture to create content.

That said, current IP laws do not recognise creative work generated start to finish by machines or artificial intelligence (AI).

“By doing that, you would be giving AI human agency, and that means a major shift in the entire legal system.”

A related issue is how IP rules ought to be framed – if at all – to address issues surrounding AI and generative AI. While the European Union is for regulation, the US vehemently feels that the technology should be allowed to develop without excessive regulation at this point in time.

The Wipo Secretariat and its director-general function to facilitate these discussions, but it is for member states to make their choices on such matters. Neither is it a dispute-settlement body; Wipo facilitates the speedy movement of IP across borders, but once within national boundaries, it is for individual legal systems to enforce the regulations.

Similarly, while Wipo can provide a forum for arbitration and mediation, it does not itself get involved in arbitrating. Interestingly, IP mediation is growing in double digits every year.

Singaporeans would be relieved to know that one area in which Wipo thankfully does not operate is patenting food recipes. Not that this has not crossed Mr Tang’s mind.

Born to a Peranakan father (who, in retirement, organises hawker food tours) and a Cantonese mother – cultures that tend to be more food-obsessed than others – Mr Tang, as then head of the IP Office of Singapore some years ago, offered local hawkers help to bring IP protection to their recipes. To a man, they resisted the idea.

“Don’t touch our hawker food, because we learn from others and inspire each other,” they told him.

“If you make it a part of IP, you may slow down innovation because we are forever looking to see what our competitor is doing and if he is trying out something new, I want to try that myself.”

Mr Tang took away something from that experience.

“The lesson I learnt from that was that IP is also about balance – it is a tool to achieve something and not an end in itself,” he says.

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