Daily Times

KARACHI: If Pakistan wants to boost its share of the international market that could see its exports increase by up to 50 percent, then the both political leadership and the country’s leading industrialists need to work together on prioritising patent registration and licencing.

Haris Zaheer Bajwa, a Pakistani-American lawyer and patent expert, issued this urgent recommendation on Friday while talking to the media at the US Consulate. He stressed that there was no time to waste in raising awareness about Intellectual Property Rights at both the public and private sector level. All stakeholders need to be proactively involved when it comes to implementing IPRs, he added.

At the government level, the priority remains removing existing handicaps to patent development. “Pakistan should implement IPR laws for its own future interests rather than simply submitting to external pressure.”

Bajwa has spent more than a decade developing and defending patents for multinational giants such as Google and Samsung.He said he found it hard to understand how it was in Pakistan that IPRs were exclusively viewed through an unfavourable prism. Citing the example of Sialkot-based football manufacturing companies, Bajwa noted, “those with registered patents have seen their revenues increase by 300-500 percent.” Yet the total volume of patents registered annually in Pakistan continues to stagnate at around the 10-15 mark. Moreover, none of these has been registered inside Pakistan. The process is undertaken abroad and mostly by Pakistanis holding dual nationality. ” In Iran, despite existing restrictions around 120 patents are registered there every year,” Bajwa pointed out.

“Pakistan is home to much discussion about knowledge-based economy. Yet this is usually restricted to the IT (Information Technology) industry. We need to look beyond that because IPRs are related to each and every sector of the economy.”Bajwa was also keen to note that Pakistan needed to recognise that the highly talented engineers and entrepreneurs that it produces need IPRs to build knowledge economy.

Debunking prevailing notions regarding piracy, copyright and increased pricing for patented goods, Bajwa said that this doesn’t necessarily affect goods produced for local markets. Yet, he noted, copyright violation tops the list of organised crime in the US, beating even the heroin trade due to its immense profitability offset by the intangible risk involved.

Bajwa ended the session by warning local entrepreneurs, small business owners and engineering students to safeguard innovations against intellectual property theft by competitors. The priority was to build market value through new product development and due industrial process.