More than 1,700 participants – including government Ministers, industry leaders in the field of AI and IP as well as other stakeholders – registered to join the launch event on March 17, 2026 held at WIPO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

IPA EC member, and President of the Brazil Publishers Association, Dante Cid, followed up on his participation in WIPO’s Road to AIII webinar series and was able to share the experience of publishers in the Latin America while taking care to emphasise that the future cannot be one size fits all and that different solutions will be needed for different creative sectors.

Later in the day Guoyi Zhao, Director, Government Affairs, RELX, China, spoke about the logical alignment of AI development and copyright protection – that the best AI tools will be built on high quality content, most of which is copyrighted content. If this does not happen, he warned, then it will be like a tree without roots. 

The session closed with interventions from the floor. IPA Secretary General, José Borghino delivered the following statement: 

The International Publishers Association has 107 members in 85 countries. We welcome the launch of the AIII as emblematic of WIPO’s interest in exploring the infrastructure that supports AI developments.

In book publishing, many people only see the end-result — the title in a bookshop, the educational textbook, or the academic journal. But these products are the result of a complex value chain with an array of infrastructure elements which ensures that the intellectual property behind the works is respected, that the works are discoverable, and that they comply with various legislative regulations. 

Rights infrastructure in publishing is secured through a variety of licensing arrangements. Just last week we were at the London Book Fair. For three days, we witnessed tables full of publishers and agents negotiating rights, securing co-edition and translation deals, ensuring the global flow of written culture through the fair remuneration that the system is based upon. 

Our infrastructure includes identifiers and metadata like the ISBN or International Standard Book Number: an ISO standard and an essential part of the global publishing business. Publishers generally rely on ISBN identifiers as an essential part of our legal supply chain, but it was also crucial in identifying those works that were part of the pirated ‘Books3’ dataset downloaded by some AI companies desperately looking for unlicensed access to the most valuable writing that humanity has produced. 

The publishing sector has evolved so that the nomenclature behind books — our metadata — translates across languages and across all platforms to support discoverability by booksellers, libraries and people from any country. ‘Science fiction romance’? There is a metadata code for that. Is a book available in a format that is compliant with the European Accessibility Act? Publishers’ metadata can tell you. 

Publishers recognize the potential of AI to support human creativity. Publishing continues to take up new technologies and respond to new regulations. Integration with existing and new infrastructure is essential to ensure AI fulfils its potential in ways that still guarantee stakeholders what they deserve when AI platforms access their work: namely consent, credit and compensation. We look forward to supporting that process.

WIPO hopes that the AIII will stimulate conversations that include creators, rights-holders, developers and technical experts around issues like facilitating access to data at scale, identification and attribution standards, watermarking, fingerprinting, rights management and even the use of AI to address IP enforcement and infrastructure.

To support the detailed, technical-level discussions envisioned for AIII, a Technical Exchange Network has been assembled with over 90 experts from dozens of countries, spanning technology firms, AI developers, rightsholders, individual creators, academia, and civil society.

You can watch the webcast on-demand and view the materials

https://www.wipo.int/en/web/frontier-technologies/artificial-intelligence/ai-infrastructure-interchange