Respect work of inventors by not pirating them, urges expert

SALALAH, JULY 15 - Protecting an individual’s original work is an easy as well as a difficult assignment in the wake of advancement of technology. This has a positive effect on both — innovators and violators, said Intellectual Property (IP) rights practitioner Peter Mehravari. A strong framework can be highly beneficial for an individual and the state in course of protecting someone’s intellectual property rights and creating a situation for revenue generation through right means, he said in an interview to Observer. He said that there should be more awareness both on protection and consumer sides to understand the value of IP rights and get benefited as protector as well as an innovator. Mehravari, who is also IP Attaché at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), was in Salalah to take part in Joint GCC-USPTO meeting. He called for stringent measures for protecting the rights of real inventors before his work being leaked to some smart operators and thus losing a real innovator. “This is a huge personal loss to the innovator as well as an intellectual loss to the state or the government”, he said. Commenting on his role as an IP practitioner, Mehravari said, “I travel to different countries to talk about intellectual property. My three key responsibilities include helping the companies on IP in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. I meet inventors, content writers and intellectuals. I convince them about using patent and tools to protect their copyright and trade secrets.” “My next responsibility is to work with different governments to help assist ways to protect IP rights for everyone in their countries… there are so many local creators, designers, innovators in the region and protecting their rights are very important,” he said. Outreach is the third tool that Mehravari uses for IP. Through this he tries to convince everyone not to buy pirated products. “Because by buying such products you are disrespecting the original work and putting down the creators and inventors”, he says The Intellectual Property Department of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry was key partner of the meeting, which was held under the banner of ‘Joint GCC-USPTO copyright seminar — collective management and digital copyright’ and ‘Strategic patent examination practices’. The gathering in Salalah, according to him, was very important. It involved people from government officials from the GCC, World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), USPTO representatives and other stakeholders. “In a three-day programme on copyright management systems we brought 11 experts from around the world and also from the region to come and discuss the best practices to protect copyright material but also licensing it out to collect revenue for the work they have done.” After that the experts did two-day course on patent examination strategies as a foreigner partner examiner. It discussed how the partner examiners can do higher quality job so that when they get application from certain inventors, they can write better patent applications so that the claim is stronger and more efficient and easier for the other examiners to review and look at. “And we hope that the programme would help the local inventors get quality patent and get that enforced better and they would be stronger when they go to organisations or to the other countries,” Mehravari said.