SALALAH, JULY 7 - At a high-level meeting on copyright and patenting policies on Sunday, experts from the Sultanate’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry, US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and representatives from GCC countries made a strong ground for copyright and related rights issues. To put due focus on copyright and patent issues, the meeting would hold two different sessions on ‘Joint GCC-USPTO copyright seminar ‑ collective management and digital copyright’ and ‘Strategic patent examination practices’. The first session, which began on Sunday, will continue until Tuesday, while the second will start on Wednesday and conclude on Thursday.
The Intellectual Property Department of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry is key partner of the meeting, which is being held at the Sultan Qaboos Youth Complex for Culture and Entertainment.
In their welcome addresses, Eman al Bader, Head of Intellectual Property Training Centre, Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), and Peter Mehravari, IP Attaché, USPTO, highlighted
issues related to intellectual property rights and called upon the participants to draw proper guidelines for the same to protect the talent rights of their countries in the light of legislation in the GCC countries.
Peter Mehravari is a Patent Attorney and serving as IP Attaché, USPTO in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. In his comments to Observer, Mehravari called for protection of local talents and said: “So much local talents are there and it is important to protect their talent and give them their due. It is important thus to value IP practices, educate foreign government officials, students, entrepreneurs, and business representatives on IP related issues, and for this conduct of public awareness programmes is very important.”
Ann Chaitovitz, also an IP Attaché USPTO, gave an overview of the copyright and rights related to it in her presentation titled, ‘Introduction to collective management of copyright and related rights,’ while Mehravari discussed the IP collective management in the context of the GCC region.
All the participants were of the view that the best IP practices needed to be adopted to achieve the right goal of such endeavours. Stress was also on maintaining transparency while doing collective management of IP practices.
The participants are to discuss issues like ‘Rights implicated in digital business models’; ‘Who can help build collective societies’ and ‘Collective management for music, musical compositions and sound recordings’ on day 2 of the first session.
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