Summary

This project begins from a simple observation: in modern trade, it is not enough for a services market to be open on paper. What matters just as much is whether firms can actually use the intellectual property, data, code, content and know-how needed to deliver the service.

New Zealand is a trade-dependent economy, and services now sit at the centre of that economy. But services are no longer just about people and physical infrastructure. They are increasingly shaped by intangible assets such as software, trade marks, databases, content rights and traditional knowledge. That means the trade rules for services and the rules for intellectual property often work together in the same commercial transaction, even though they were negotiated in separate legal tracks.

The research behind this report maps those connections in a practical way. It uses the IP-Services Toolkit to show where IP is an input to a service, where it is an output of a service, and where it is not especially important. The result is a qualitative map of the places where IP settings are likely to shape real market access, not just the legal wording of a schedule.

The main lesson is that services policy and IP policy cannot be treated as separate silos. In software and audiovisual services, IP rights are part of the service itself. In tourism and health, IP sits around the service as an enabling layer, but still shapes value, control and access. Across all four case studies, the same point comes through: formal openness in a trade agreement does not always mean practical openness in the market.

This report therefore asks policymakers to read services commitments and IP rules together, sector by sector, and to look carefully at the ordinary business realities that sit between them: licensing, platform control, data access, brand protection and upstream inputs. That is where the real trade effects often appear.

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