When this Journal decided to run a special issue on IP in the Asia-Pacific region, it was following the conventional wisdom of the profession and the marketplace. For many years, the concept of the Asia-Pacific sold conferences and printed publications. And it was on this assumption that JIPLP based its decision to give over its March issue for coverage of that zone. However, there comes a point in the life of any sentient IP expert when he examines the premises upon which his thoughts are based and finds them lacking in realworld justification. The exercise of putting this issue together has been one such catalyst. The packaging of separate national jurisdictions into regions has become a habit of thought in more than merely IP circles, and it is easy to see how this packaging has been achieved. ‘North America’ is a region on account of inherent similarities between the three enormous countries between which it is split and the degree of economic and legal cooperation engendered by the North American Free Trade Agreement. ‘Latin America’ is closely bound by linguistic and religious ties, colonial histories, the long political march from dictatorship to democracy, and the emergence of loose alliances in MERCOSUR and the Andean Pact. ‘Europe’ is a closely integrated body with a high degree of economic, social, and legal harmonization and even, remarkably, a single currency shared by many of its nations. The ‘Middle East’ is tied by oil-fired economies, nourished by petrodollars but bled by the importation of IP products in many sectors and the remittance of wages by imported labour, while ‘Africa’ is a region that is sadly defined by its negative qualities: lack of market discipline, lack of political credibility, lack of resources to develop IP, lack of strong distributional and communication infrastructures but, most seriously, lack of self-confidence and of the belief that its many nations can genuinely achieve more than they have done so far. ‘Asia-Pacific’ is the bit of the inhabited world that does not fit into the scheme outlined above. It appears increasingly that the only way ‘Asia-Pacific’ can be validated as a concept is by looking at that vast and hyperactive zone from somewhere the other side of Pluto. For one thing, it is so big—in terms of geographical spread and population—that in many ways it is more representative of the world as a whole than of a regional segment of it. To lump the teeming masses of China’s communist population, about a fifth of the Earth’s population, together with the democratic masses of India, Indonesia, Japan, and Pakistan on the assumption that they are fertile ground for sowing seeds of similarity, is futile. The region also boasts some remarkably IP-savvy regions that have little to learn from Europe and the Americas: in this category are infotechrich Japan and Singapore, South Korea, and the more urbane regions of the Philippines and Malaysia. The jewel in this crown is Australia, a land that, with its small population, now exports IP scholars and their scholarship in much the same carefree manner as 19th century UK exported criminals and their crime. Nor can ‘Asia-Pacific’ be a euphemism for a group of countries that, while strong on imitation, are weak in innovation. The sharp rise in patent, design, and utility model filing activities among local applicants in Japan, China, and South Korea demonstrates that myth is dead, while the surge of Bollywood and the outsourcing of software writing to India show that, in copyright too, the region is rich in creativity. While Asia-Pacific brands do not dominate the world’s ‘Top 100’ lists, the same can be said of brands originating from practically everywhere except the USA—and the sounds of Lenovo and Tata are becoming increasingly familiar in Western ears. The contention of this Editorial is that the time has come to ditch the ‘Asia-Pacific’ concept and to replace it with other concepts that have some validity in their as tools of analysis and generalization. At present, it is hard to avoid drawing the conclusion that anyone who thinks of ‘Asia-Pacific’ in terms of IP is actually revealing more about the insularity of his own attitudes and perceptions, or the laziness or lack of imagination that characterizes his own thought processes, than about the region itself.