Strong IPR key to competitiveness

Miah Rahmat Ali and M. Masrur Reaz | Published: July 11, 2014 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2024 06:01:00

The growing importance of international trade has made Intellectual Property Rights or IPR a subject of global concern.
In this era of globalisation and rapid expansion of the world economy, intellectual property and IPR have become crucial to economic, social, and technological advancement of developed and emerging nations alike.
IPR can stimulate innovation and new technologies, increase agricultural and industrial production, promote domestic and foreign investment, and facilitate technology transfer - key ingredients fuelling overall global competitiveness.
Bangladesh, a rapidly developing country, has defied many odds to sustain economic growth at 6.5 per cent over the last decade. However, challenges remain to attain the much-desired status of the middle-income country. The country requires a strong infrastructure growth and needs to improve overall competitiveness of its economy by encouraging new ideas and innovation.
With a private sector that has been growing significantly, the country does not lack entrepreneurial drive. What it needs is more certain and efficient regulatory framework or a friendly business-operating environment.
Among others, the country lacks a modern intellectual property rights (IPR) framework that can stimulate invention, technological advancements while increasing agriculture and industrial production. Due to inadequate policy and enforcement, counterfeit and pirated products are openly available in the market. These are not only eating up industries' competitiveness but also discouraging the private sector to invest in innovation.
In this era of globalisation, without continuous innovation, the private sector of Bangladesh will become uncompetitive in the near future. It thus will not be able to sustain their individual and collective economic growth of the country.
The Bangladesh government has recognised IPR as a resource that can be utilised as a major driver of economic growth to facilitate effective development. In order to enforce IPR, the government must create a comprehensive national strategy outlining how policy developments and implementation will take place in a coordinated manner within its national framework i.e. industrial policy.
The framework must spell out how to develop an effective IP system for Bangladesh. This is to create a congenial environment where innovators will always look for needs of the private sector to gain commercially from their innovation and creation.
The goal of IP strategy should have short, medium and long-term plan, where all national stakeholders can work together to create, own and exploit research results, innovation, new technologies and creativity.
Bangladesh's legal and institutional framework for IPR protection is still at a nascent stage. We inherited a set of IP laws and rules from the colonial regime. Although some of them were amended over time, the Patents and Designs Act, for instance, is still from 1911. Hence, the archaic ordinance does not reflect or meet the demand of our industrial sector to accelerate growth.Â Bangladesh does not have any comprehensive or separate IP laws.
A knowledge-based economy requires robust enforcement mechanism to safeguard innovation against unfair competition. IPR should serve to protect large and risky investments. Otherwise, illegal exploitation of IPR through piracy and various infringements will lead to unfair competition and distort the market.
Essentially, Bangladesh needs to develop its own system and strengthen its administrative capacities to improve enforcement of IP rights. It needs to formulate policies and strategies to make them consistent with the WTO's agreement on the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS), restructure its overall institutions, and undertake training and awareness programmes among policy-makers and other key players such as judiciary, magistrates and customs authority etc.
The government has already taken a concerted effort to develop a more effective and efficient IPR system as its first step. However, more attention is needed to address capacity of the officials and the overall IP administration.
The Department of Patents, Designs and Trademarks (DPDT), in cooperation with the Bangladesh Investment Climate Fund (BICF) and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), have streamlined the country's IP registration system via digitisation. This aims at reducing the backlog of files, cutting corruption, and improving overall transparency. This will help certainly to create a favourable business environment through enhancing regulatory transparency, certainty, and efficiency by reducing administrative and regulatory burden.
Applicants are now able to receive effective, efficient, and quicker services in registering patents, designs, and trademarks in industrial and service sectors. With the new automated system, novelty checking, as well as registration processing, time and cost have been significantly reduced. This has led to 25 per cent lowering of overall administrative burden of the processes.
The manual checking process has now been replaced by a simple searching and approval process. It has thus significantly reduced time as a result of digitising thousands of backlog files.
Process automation is the very first step in the entire IPR system.
The DPDT has achieved a remarkable milestone through this automation. However, it has to walk a long way to become a modern IPR office. Attention should be given to (a) further enhancement of the system including web-based journal publication, enabling online IP searching for registered clients, ensuring online application and approval system, (b) development of an appropriate IP policy, (c) modernisation ofÂ related laws and rules, (d) development of a regulatory monitoring and enforcement mechanism to project IPR, and (e) development of institutional and staff capacity.
The writers work for the Bangladesh Investment Climate Fund (BICF)
programme of the IFC.