Dominican Republic's Bold IP Strategy: Empowering Creators for Success

A song can make a country famous while the person who wrote it can’t collect on it. On June 11, 2026, the Dominican Republic told the world it was going to fix that.

Keep that in your pocket. You’ll need it.

A song can make a country famous while the person who wrote it can’t collect on it. A brand can define a culture while its founder has zero leverage the moment that brand tries to cross a border. On June 11, 2026, the Dominican Republic told the world it was going to fix that — a National Intellectual Property Strategy running through 2030, built with the World Intellectual Property Organization.

I’m not here to trash it. I’m a Puerto Rican trademark attorney who grew up in New York and now lives in the Dominican Republic, and the ambition here is real. What I’m here to do is the thing nobody did at the launch ceremony: separate what’s actually funded and running from what’s still a slide.

Strip away the ceremony and here’s the architecture: five axes — creation, institutional modernization, commercialization, enforcement, governance — built around one real idea. The government is trying to move the whole system from registration to revenue. Not “did you file the paperwork,” but “did you get paid.” WIPO’s account of the strategy.

That’s the right question, and most countries never get to it. Trademark registration and patent filing get treated as the finish line. They aren’t. A registered trademark that never generates a licensing deal is a certificate on a wall. The plan includes university tech-transfer offices, export support for small businesses, a national marketplace to connect IP owners with buyers, and — this is the detail worth noticing — actual work with banks on how to value intangible assets as collateral. That last one is the tell. Most governments stop at “please register your trademark application.” Getting to “how does a bank value a brand” is a different level of seriousness.

Governments launch strategies. Most die somewhere in the second paragraph of the second press release. This one has a pulse, and here’s the receipt.

A March 2 update from ONDA — the Dominican copyright office — laid out four things already in motion, not promised:

Director José Rubén Gonell Cosme didn’t dress it up: copyright has to modernize or the creative economy doesn’t survive. The minister who ran the launch, Eduardo Sanz Lovatón, was blunter: “the mission is not accomplished.” Dominican Presidency’s update. When was the last time you heard a government official say that at their own event?

The same update confirms the country is pursuing Madrid Protocol accession — worth being precise here, because most people reading this don’t actually know what that changes. The Dominican Republic is not currently a Madrid Protocol member. That means a Dominican trademark registration today gets you protection in exactly the countries you separately file in, one at a time, one fee at a time.

Joining Madrid doesn’t make international protection free. It makes it one filing instead of twelve.

Here’s the part that should make you skeptical, and the part that should make you less skeptical, in the same breath.

Earlier strategy, WIPO Lex. This is not the country’s first swing. The new strategy also proposes something the 2012 version didn’t: a permanent Technical Secretariat and a monitoring dashboard tracking actual licensing deals and creative exports, not just filings. Whether that dashboard becomes something a small business owner can actually read, or just another PDF that lives in an interagency folder, is the whole ballgame.

Now back to that 55% number.

A strategy built on formal trademark registration, licensing platforms, and export channels has a structural reach problem before it schedules a single workshop — because more than half the economy sits outside every system this strategy plugs into. You cannot license a brand you never registered because registering it cost more than you had. This is, at its core, a question about how you protect a business name when protecting it costs real money.

And registration is only step one. I do this for a living in the U.S. system, and I can tell you the honest answer to “how much does a trademark cost” is never the sticker price. It’s the government filing fee, plus the attorney’s fee, plus the cost of responding if an examiner pushes back, plus a renewal five and ten years later. A small business trademark attorney isn’t a luxury line item — for more than half the Dominican economy, it’s currently not a service at all, because the business behind it doesn’t exist on paper yet.

Digital filing helps. ONDA’s online platform is real, and it matters for a musician working out of Santiago instead of the capital. But digitizing the form doesn’t touch the actual cost problem — a lawyer, an international filing, a negotiation. If that gap doesn’t close, the strategy’s biggest winners will be the businesses that were already going to be fine.

One more data point, because I don’t like making an argument on vibes: the Dominican Republic ranked 97th of 139 countries on WIPO’s 2025 Global Innovation Index. Flat. Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Costa Rica have all moved up. One Dominican economist’s read on that ranking: weak university-industry collaboration is the reason research doesn’t turn into patents or licensing revenue. That’s the same gap the strategy itself calls “limited technology-transfer capacity.” The government isn’t hiding from the diagnosis. It just hasn’t built the cure yet.

Quick distinction, because people conflate these constantly: a trademark protects your brand name and logo. Copyright protects the creative work itself — the song, the design, the film. Trademark vs. copyright isn’t a technicality. It’s the difference between owning your name and owning your work, and a strategy this ambitious needs creators who understand both, not just whichever one they Googled first.

Here’s the thing nobody says out loud at a launch ceremony: closing a licensing deal is not automatically a win. A transaction can generate revenue while quietly transferring most of the long-term value to whoever’s on the other side of the table. Selling rights can be smart. Signing them away without understanding the term length, the royalty math, or the exit is a different transaction wearing the same suit.

Creators need to understand exclusivity, deductions, audit rights, and termination clauses — not eventually, at the negotiating table. A musician needs to read the agreement attached to the “opportunity.” A designer needs to know exactly what a client is buying. A founder needs to know who owns the brand after the distribution deal closes.

And here’s where it gets interesting: the strategy’s own language backs up my worry instead of denying it. The adopted plan reportedly calls commercial exploitation of Dominican IP “incipient” — a polite word for barely happening — and states outright that most small and medium businesses don’t build IP into how they compete or export. It also admits there’s no structured national platform yet for licensing or transferring IP assets. Reporting on the adopted strategy, Dominican Today. That’s the government agreeing with me. I’ll take it — self-awareness beats spin every time. But it also means the actual question, who’s in the room negotiating on behalf of the independent designer when a licensing offer lands, is still unanswered on launch day.

Counting signed deals tells you nothing about who won them.

This is the part most coverage of the launch skipped, and I think it’s the most underrated piece of the entire strategy.

On February 4, 2026, ONAPI’s director general, Salvador Ramos, and INDEX’s executive director, Celinés Toribio, signed a renewable agreement built specifically around training and technical support for Dominicans abroad — help identifying, registering, and protecting brands, patents, and industrial designs, framed around codevelopment, not charity. ONAPI’s announcement. That’s infrastructure, not a photo op.

But here’s what it doesn’t fix: a Dominican trademark registration does not extend to the United States. Trademark protection is territorial.

If you’re a Dominican entrepreneur — or a diaspora founder building a brand between Santo Domingo and Washington Heights — expanding into the U.S. requires a separate filing, a separate strategy, and yes, a US trademark lawyer who understands both sides of that border. Registrar una marca en Estados Unidos is a different process than registering one in the DR, with different deadlines, different classes, and real risk if you get the timing wrong. WIPO’s guidance on protection abroad.

I’d build a recurring bilingual program connecting Dominican entrepreneurs, diaspora founders, and qualified advisers in their target markets — not a one-time workshop, a standing relationship. Send people out with an actual assessment: their brand, their ownership records, their contracts, their international priorities. Then follow up and find out if they acted on it.

This is what I call Cultural Clarity with a commercial purpose: know what makes your work distinct before you decide how it travels. Trademark-First, before you spend real money on packaging and distribution. There’s a real, underserved market here for a trademark attorney for Latino businesses who actually works in both languages — un abogado de marcas en Estados Unidos who is trademark lawyer Spanish speaking isn’t a nice-to-have. For this population, it’s the difference between owning the thing and losing it to someone who filed first.

One more question the launch didn’t touch: who decides how shared culture gets commercialized?

If a strategy is going to protect and monetize things like regional food traditions, music styles, or collective craft — what can be trademarked when the “brand” belongs to a community and not a single founder — implementation needs to say, specifically, how communities get a vote, who’s allowed to use collective branding, and how the money actually reaches small producers instead of stopping at whoever filed first.

An ownership agenda also has to leave room for education, competition, and new work to exist. Enforcement needs real remedies and a way to challenge a mistaken claim.

More aggressive protection isn’t automatically better policy. Sometimes it’s just a bigger stick in the hands of whoever got to the filing office first.

Here’s the part almost nobody covering this launch is citing, and it’s the strongest data point in the entire story.

The Dominican Republic sat on the U.S. Trade Representative’s Special 301 intellectual property watch list every single year from 1996 to 2024. Twenty-eight years. In 2024, it came off — first time ever — credited to real enforcement against signal piracy and counterfeit medicine, more specialized IP prosecutors, and better coordination through the Interministerial Council on Intellectual Property, created in 2022. USTR’s 2024 Special 301 Report. The 2026 report confirms the country is still off the list, with that same council still coordinating and still publishing annual reports. USTR’s 2026 Special 301 Report.

In 2025 alone: roughly 12,000 enforcement operations, more than 95 million counterfeit units seized. Consejo Interministerial de Propiedad Intelectual annual report. That’s not a committee that meets quarterly and issues a statement. That’s a state actually doing something.

I’ll add the caveat I’d want if I were reading this instead of writing it: seizing 95 million units is mostly big counterfeiting operations, not the kind of dispute an independent designer runs into. State enforcement capacity and an individual creator’s actual access to a remedy are related. They are not the same thing. The strategy needs to show progress on both, and right now it’s only proven the first one.

A strategy that runs through 2030 without a real answer on AI is already behind schedule. Creators need practical guidance — not policy language — on AI contract clauses, cloned voices, work getting scraped into training data, and where to actually file a dispute when it happens.

The strategy claims alignment with the country’s National AI Strategy. Fine. That’s a sentence in a document. The test is whether a musician whose voice gets cloned without permission has an actual process to follow — not a citation pointing to another citation.

Four questions. If the strategy can’t answer yes to these by 2030, the launch ceremony was theater:

Measure those against the strategy’s own promised numbers — creative exports, licenses signed, contracts closed — not just mine. Publish it somewhere the public can actually read it, not just the Interministerial Council. Publish what worked. Publish what didn’t.

The Dominican Republic has a real shot at making ownership a practical part of economic development, not just a policy talking point. That deserves support. It also deserves scrutiny, long after the ceremony ends and the press releases stop running.

By 2030, the only evidence that will actually matter is people — not institutions — who can point to more control over their work, more dependable income, and something worth passing down.

That’s what it should mean to own what defines you.

This article provides general information, not legal advice. Reading this article does not create an attorney-client relationship.