The Intellectual Property Organisation (IPO) Pakistan is all set to increase processing fee for trademarks, patents and copyrights cases, official sources told Business Recorder. IPO (Pakistan) was established as an umbrella autonomous organisation through Act No XXII of 2012 to manage all intellectual property laws including trademarks, patents, copyrights, industrial designs and law-out designs of integrated circuits.
IPO (Pakistan) meets its expenditures out of the receipts charged for examination and registration of different intellectual property rights. The fee structure was conservatively revised only once in June, 2011 after that IP legislations of Pakistan were amended to bring them in consonance with the agreement on Trade- Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
According to sources, IPO-Pakistan had undertaken a number of initiatives to improve the IP service delivery in the country including one window operation at IP registries at Karachi, examination of trademark applications at Regional Office Lahore and receiving application at IPO office, Islamabad. Moreover, e-filing of applications and free IP search facilities are also being offered through a new web-portal. The organisation has also initiated the process of acceding to international treaties including Madrid Protocol for registration of trademark.
The sources said, presently IPO-Pakistan is functioning with about 56 per cent of its sanctioned human resource. In order to make IPO-Pakistan robust organisation, as per with the international standards, it needs to fill in the sanctioned posts and requires to create more posts for achieving its objectives. Moreover, additional funds are required to upgrade IP infrastructure and support the proposed initiatives which cannot be met under the existing fee structure. Another important dimension is that due to existing lower fee structure, many undesirable applications for registration of trademarks are being filed with the ulterior motives of killing the competition instead of safeguarding intellectual property rights. Therefore, the revision of fee structure will serve the organisation by providing necessary finances as well as discoursing undesirable applications.
Section-13(iv) of IPO-Pakistan Act 2012 allows levying such charges or fees for services and facilities rendered by the organisation and its constituent officers with the approval of the federal government. Section -6(2)9(e) of the Act empowers the IPO Policy Board to specify and propose fee, penalties and other charges chargeable by the organisation with the approval of the federal government for carrying out the purposes of the Act.
Keeping in view financial constraints, a proposal for revision of fee structure was submitted to the IPO Policy Board on December 22, 2016, which approved the proposal for submission to the federal government.
The sources further stated that the revision of the fee required amendments in the respective schedule of the Trade Marks Rules, 2004, the Patent Rules, 2003 and the copyright rules, 1967.
The Cabinet Committee for disposal of Legislative Cases (CCLC) in its meeting on October 2, 2017 considered a proposal of Commerce Division on revision of fee structure for intellectual property services and deferred it for further clarification as to fulfillment/confirmation of perquisites codal formalities of previous publication etc. Accordingly, the required formalities including publication of proposed fee through gazette notification of March 29, 2018 were carried out inviting objections/suggestions during the 30 days' time period which expired on April 27, 2018. However, no objections/suggestions had been received during this period. Accordingly, the requisite codal formalities stand fulfilled.
The draft notifications for revision of the structure for trademarks, patents and copyrights were submitted for the approval of CCLC. The notifications will come into effect from March 30, 2019. The cabinet recently endorsed the decision of CCLC.
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