Protection of intellectual property rights

The Federal Cabinet has approved a proposal to establish an organisation to be known as Pakistan Intellectual Property Rights Organisation (PIPRO) with a view to effectively overseeing measures designed to protect the rights of foreign manufacturing companies against counterfeiting of their products in Pakistan.
A government handout in this regard described the decision as a step to meet international obligations under the WTO agreement calling for safeguarding the intellectual property rights in international trade.
It has also been pointed out that the existing official efforts in this direction have been found to be inadequate and the three offices set up for this purpose could not effectively co-ordinate with each other to achieve the desired results.
The new centralised organisation is supposed to overcome the deficiencies so far faced in the implementation of the regime of intellectual property rights.
The WTO agreement, which was finalised at the end of 1994, for the first time in the history of GATT included the issue of intellectual property rights as an important yardstick in the liberalisation of world trade. Under this agreement, it has been made obligatory for each member-country to ensure that the products registered under the international patents and copyrights are not imitated or sold in the form of spurious or counterfeited products.
The idea behind this agreement was obviously protect the interests of foreign manufacturers, including publishers of books against heavy losses that they might in the event of counterfeiting of their products in different countries.
It is true that heavy investments by a number of leading multinational companies are involved in the development of new products such as medicines and scientific products and appliances, besides research work in the form of books including text books.
A wide-scale infringement of the patents and copyrights by unscrupulous traders and manufacturers in different countries of the world through sale of the counterfeited products, would definitely hurt the legal owners of the original products.
The problem does involve serious efforts for the implementation of the aforesaid agreement by the member countries. However, it appears to be a highly cumbersome and complicated task to grapple with successfully.
The implementation process requires an elaborate network of the official departments which are supposed to effectively check the sale of counterfeit products in the markets and at the same time to prosecute the culprits engaged in producing and selling these products freely.
In Pakistan, the situation in respect of the implementation of the WTO rules relating to intellectual property rights, does not appear to be as satisfactory as expected by the multinational companies whose products are generally subjected to counterfeiting. Nevertheless the efforts by the local administration in this direction have been found to be quite fruitful as could be concluded from the occasional police raids on the shops and business establishments where sales of counterfeit items are suspected to be in progress.
Meanwhile, the representatives of industries owned and operated by multinational companies have been very vocal in seminars and other public fora complaining about the wide scale piracy of the patented and copyrighted products in Pakistan.
They have been quoting figures of huge financial losses that these companies are inevitably incurring because of piracy. At the same time foreign diplomats have also been warning that Pakistan might face action from donor countries in the form of suspension of financial flows in case the country fails to effectively counteract the infringement of copyrights and patents.
These threats do not seem to have taken concrete shape so far but one may expect stricter postures from these countries after 2005 when effective implementation of the WTO agreement is to be initiated.
It may also be pointed out here that one of the reasons of slow movement of foreign private investment into Pakistan is the growing complaint of multinational companies about Pakistan's failure to effectively protect intellectual property rights.