World Intellectual Property Day is observed annually on 26 April. The event was established by the World Intellectual Property Organization in 2000 to "raise awareness of how patents, copyright, trademarks and designs impact on daily life" and "to celebrate creativity, and the contribution made by creators and innovators to the development of societies across the globe". 26 April was chosen as the date for World Intellectual Property Day because it coincides with the date on which the Convention Establishing the World Intellectual Property Organizationentered into force in 1970. behind Steve Jobs’ innovations opened to the public at WIPO on 30 March 2012 and ran through to World Intellectual Property Day on 26 April 2012. The exhibition tied in with 2012's World Intellectual Property Day theme – 'Visionary Innovators'. This event has been criticized by a number of activists and scholars as one-sided propaganda in favor of traditional copyright, ignoring alternatives related to copyleft and the free culture movement.
Mike Masnick of Techdirt wrote that World Intellectual Property Day is intended "to promote ever greater protectionism and mercantilism in favor of copyright holders and patent holders, while ignoring any impact on the public of those things. It's a fairly disgusting distortion of the claimed intent of intellectual property." Zak Rogoff of the Defective by Design noted that this event is a "global but decidedly not grassroots event". This event has also been criticized by the activists from civil society organizations such as IP Justice and the Electronic Information for Libraries who consider it one-sided propaganda as the marketing materials associated with the event, provided by WIPO, "come across as unrepresentative of other views and events". Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, noted that "World Intellectual Property Day has become little more than a lobbyist day". Cushla Kapitzk from the Queensland University of Technology wrote that most of the WIPO's statements related to promotion of the World Intellectual Property Day are "either exaggerated or unsubstantiated"; noting that for example one of WIPO's claims used to promote this event, namely that "copyright helps bring music to our ears and art, films and literature before our eyes" is "tenuous at best, and lexical association of copyright with things recognised as having social and cultural value functions to legitimate its formulation and widespread application". A number of grassroots-supported observances in opposition of prevalent IP laws celebrated by the World Intellectual Property Day exist, none of them supported by WIPO:
