Monday, May 14, 2007 Mandatory teaching of IP urged
INTELLECTUAL property (IP) may seem an unfamiliar subject to many Filipinos today but its inclusion in the academic curricula and the documentation of the country’s biodiversity and genetic resources and traditional knowledge will be steps toward increasing awareness on the issue.
This is the situation in the country’s universities and research institutions, on its biodiversity and genetic resources and on traditional knowledge, just three of the seven sectors covered in drafting a national intellectual property strategy (Nips).
“There is a need to increase professional education in IP in terms of making this a mandatory subject in schools at all levels or elevating IP to the regular and mandatory subject for law schools,” Nips project director Eugeniano Perez III said Friday at an IP orientation.
The orientation, held May 10 to 11 at Waterfront Cebu City Hotel and Casino, was for officers and staff of the Department of Trade and Industry and Department of Science and Technology of certain regions in Visayas and Mindanao.
“Business and economic departments of universities and post-graduate schools lack research papers on IP,” Perez said.
Other concerns in this sector are the need for assistance in the commercialization of their research, the illegal photocopying of textbooks and access to educational materials.
Calling them “reservoirs of IP assets,” Perez said universities and research and development institutions, “if tapped properly, can make a great impact on the economic growth of the country,” directly or not.
Another IP asset that needs to be given focus on is the country’s biodiversity resources, he said.
Biopiracy and illegal bioprospecting are concerns in this sector. “The Philippines has lost some of its biodiversity resources such as the conus snail, banaba and nata de coco to foreign patents,” he said.
The loss comes in not being able to share in the commercial benefits of these resources that have been patented by the researchers and scientists of multi-national business and pharmaceutical companies, Perez said.
“There is a need to document our biodiversity and genetic resources so that any future claim by our country on our share in the benefits can be strengthened,” he said.
Keeping a record on them makes the world aware that these resources have their “geographic origins” in the Philippines, he said.
Genetic resources
The Philippines has “at least 70 per cent of the world’s biodiversity resources located within (its) national borders,” Perez said.
A day earlier in the same event, IP Philippines Director General Adrian Cristobal Jr. said the country’s genetic resources are an “emerging area for IP.”
The genetic resources cover 9,253 plant species and 1,309 animal species. “Almost half of the 121 plant-based prescription drugs in the world originate from the tropics,” Cristobal had said.
Another sector that is an IP asset is the traditional knowledge and geographic indicators, Perez said.
While there is the Indigenous People’s Rights Act that protects the country’s indigenous knowledge, systems and practices, the implementing office has no IP unit and “is focused more on titling of ancestral lands,” he said.
Also, he said, “there is a need to leverage on our geographic indicators for the commercial benefit and competitiveness of our various industries.”
As an example, the Philippine Institute of Traditional and Alternative Health Care of the Department of Health “is documenting and developing a Philippine brand of massage which it hopes will be as well known as the Swedish massage or Thai massage.”
Other sectors covered in the Nips consultations are copyright and creative industries, public health, small and medium enterprises and inventors and patent reform.
“IP assets are valuable, intangible business assets,” said Ramon Clarete, technical director of Emerge, the United States Agency for International Development (Usaid) project office that is working with the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (Ipophil) on the orientation series.
“A vibrant IP asset market generates more transactions of IP assets and thus induces economic development,” Clarete, also a speaker at the orientation, said.
The orientation series, held in four major cities in the country, is organized by Ipophil in cooperation with the Usaid under its Economic Modernization Through Efficient Reforms and Governance Enhancement project. (MPS)
