Oct 13 2009 |
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Lebanese ministers keen on enforcing IPR
13 October 2009
BEIRUT: Culture Minister Tammam Salam emphasized on Monday the need to enforce Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in Lebanon in order to contribute to the improvement in the performance of various Lebanese sectors. “The necessity of enforcing IPR in Lebanon stems from the fact that cultural fields contribute to 4.75 percent of GDP in addition to contributing to the employment of 4.95 percent of the national labor,” he said.
“Our study on the contributions of IPR to the various Lebanese sectors plays an important role in specifying our priorities which include raising the awareness of and educating people on the positive outcomes of respecting IPR,” he added.
His remarks came during the fifth regional coordination meeting of heads of industrial property and copyright offices in Arab countries held at Crown Plaza hotel in Beirut. The forum aims at discussing the implications of recent developments in the field of intellectual property.
According to recent statistics of the Institute of Finance, the copyright-based sectors in Lebanon employ 50,304 workers with around 46.44 percent in the core industries. It states that the copyright industries contribute 4.74 percent to GDP and 4.54 percent to employment while the core industries contribute 2.53 percent to GDP and 2.11 percent to employment.
The study added that $555.52 million of value added was generated from the core copyright industries including press and literature, music, theatrical productions, radio and television, software and databases, advertising and others.
Salam stressed the importance of innovation in the field of IPR, saying that piracy and hacking are extremely widespread around the world which creates the need of making huge efforts at the regional, national and international levels in order to solve this issue. “Technologies have allowed us to reach a point where there is no difference between an original and a pirated version which means that fighting piracy has become increasingly difficult.”
“We also need to have all our products marketed at affordable prices in the Lebanese market for us to prevent piracy activities,” he added.
Economy and Trade Minister Mohammad Safadi traced the efforts of the ministry of economy and trade in enforcing IPR. “We collaborated with a special bureau at the legislative police in terms of IPR. We have also worked in close collaboration with the Internal Security Forces in order to highlight and cease any violation of IPR,” he said.
He added that 80 monitors and more than 30 from the tarish police have been subjected to various seminars about IPR and have learned to deal with it and make it respected.”
Safadi insisted on the importance of granting patents and trademarks across the Arab world, an opinion that was supported by Saad al-Faraji, the permanent representative of Arab League. “Egypt is the first Arab country to make prerequisite studies for granting patents which should also take place in all of the other Arab countries,” said Faraji.
He stressed the importance of giving the Arabic language all of its rights for it to become an official language of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) just like any other country in the United Nations. “Arab countries lag behind and this is partly due to the lack of resources in Arabic.”
Francis Gury, WIPO’s director general, outlined the importance of the national IP offices’ role, saying they are required to contribute to national IP policy and strategy formulation in addition to developing a modern and cost effective IP management system and many others.
He stressed the need to develop human resources for the support of IP infrastructure. “I am committed to improving WIPO information resources available in Arabic,” he added.
© Copyright The Daily Star 2009.
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