Hello and welcome everyone to this online conversation hosted by the European Centre for International Political Economy, on the economic and broader societal value of intellectual property or or IP, for the EU and its member state.

My name is Jackie Davis, and today I'm very pleased to welcome Pascal Canis to this conversation.

Pascal is managing director of the European Services Forum, ESF, and wrote an insert for the recent E-Cyber study on the benefits of

intellectual property rights in EU-framed trade agreements. Pascal, great to have you with us today.

And Pascal, this study underlines the importance of IP-intensive sectors for Europe's economy,

for trade, but inevitably inevitably it always seems that most

attention focuses on the impact of policies on the manufacturing sector, on tangible goods,

as it were. But of course, most European economies are predominantly service economies.

What are the most important effects as you see them of stronger IP for the sectors

that you represent? Well, thank you, Jackie, and thank you and hello everyone. Happy to be on this

show. Well, the important aspect of the IP for the services sectors are more or less

the same for goods to have the protection of the innovation.

So when there is innovation and it is shared with others,

you have to sell it and it has to be protected.

You would know that intellectual property is in fact considered as a service in itself

because companies sell the right to use the pattern or to use the copyright or the brand or the mark or the computer software, etc.

So this is a service in itself and it is very important for services as well as for goods.

And how important is this framework from the services perspective for our competitiveness vis-a-vis other major economies.

I was struck a figure you mentioned in the piece you wrote for the study about the export

figures showing a widening EU deficit in IP. I think you said seven times higher than a decade

ago. So it looks as if our position is weakening and how significant and important is that

for our competitiveness? I will not consider that as a weakness, actually, if we have a deficit

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