TLDR: Across the country, small- and medium-sized companies rely on and benefit from balanced and certain intellectual property (IP) laws to innovate and build better businesses. That’s why this week’s celebration of World Intellectual Property Day provides a timely opportunity for U.S. policymakers to better appreciate the importance of such balance and certainty when crafting policy that applies to the emerging startups that are critical hubs of global innovation.

TLDR: A key Senate panel is holding a hearing tomorrow to discuss ways to improve diversity within the U.S. patent system. As entrepreneurs across the country call on the government to support more diversity in innovation, and with the country continuing to confront systemic inequities, policymakers must work to ensure that increasing diversity in innovation—both inside and especially outside the patent system—remains a central component of their work.

TLDR: A Supreme Court decision yesterday means that startups and developers should be able to continue to use software interfaces, known as application programming interfaces (APIs), without facing liability for copyright infringement. Startups and developers routinely rely on APIs to create interoperability and compatibility between computer programs, and they had long understood APIs to be exempt from copyright protection. But a yearslong lawsuit between Oracle and Google put that understanding—and the use of APIs—at risk. Now, the Supreme Court has held that using APIs is a fair use under the law, and its reasoning should permit entrepreneurs to continue using APIs when developing innovative products and services.