Raising awareness on the protection of intellectual property rights is key for development
Geneva, 19 July 2010 --
Every year, the countries of the UNECE region spend billions of dollars financing public research, but struggle to translate these investments into innovation-driven economic growth, in part because universities and businesses don’t always understand how to protect and exploit the intellectual property generated through public research.
Every year, counterfeit and pirated goods cause billions of dollars worth of damage to UNECE economies, in part because consumers and law enforcement agencies see intellectual property theft as a minor problem.
It is therefore important to raise awareness about the key role which intellectual property rights can play in driving innovation and about how wide-spread intellectual property theft can undermine this process.
This is one of the key messages sent by some 70 international experts gathered in Geneva on 8-9 July for the 4th annual session of the UNECE Team of Specialists on Intellectual Property. Over two days, representatives of 25 countries, the business community, academics and international organizations discussed problems of international cooperation in promoting intellectual property for innovation and intellectual property enforcement.
In his keynote speech, Mark Anderson of Dolby Laboratories remarked that his company often refrained from commercializing technologies resulting from university research because the researchers fail to protect the underlying intellectual property properly. “In every sort of engagement with a university or with a small company we take some risk that the knowledge transfer was not done appropriately”, he said.
Speaking on the need to curb intellectual property theft, Hansueli Stamm of the Swiss Institute for Intellectual Property explained that “measures should not only address the supply-side of the problem. It is crucial that we educate consumers to refrain from buying fakes in the first place.”
In addition to awareness raising, the meeting also discussed problems of enlisting shipping companies in the fight against counterfeits, how to deal with counterfeits in transit, and intellectual property management in cross-border research and development cooperation.
For more information, please visit: http://www.unece.org/ceci/ppt_presentations/2010/ip/presentationip10.html or contact Ralph Heinrich at: [email protected], tel.: +41 22 917 1269.
Ref: ECE/ECID/10/P07