RIYADH, 12 July 2004 — The Kingdom has launched a two-pronged drive to enforce intellectual property rights which involves educating consumers and corporations on the one hand and tightening up its IPR legislation on the other.
The crackdown on intellectual piracy has netted more than 1.2 million pirated PlayStation CDs worth over SR26 million in recent raids in Jeddah, one of the biggest hauls of pirated games in a single raid.
A Ministry of Culture and Information spokesman said a committee implementing intellectual property legislation had been set up. “We have also launched a public awareness campaign on the need to boycott pirated products because they have an adverse impact on the economy and discourage investment in the IT sector,” he said.
Khaled Al-Dhaher, a software professional, said the Kingdom’s new copyright law, which replaced the old one dating back to 1990, protects original works of literature, arts and sciences in different forms, including books, lectures and computer programs. It is designed to more effectively combat piracy of computer programs.
According to a Ministry of Information study, the Kingdom earned SR3.3 billion in revenues and created 12,000 new jobs in the IT sector as a result of the campaign.
Among other measures, it banned the sale of pirated computer software, audio cassettes and videos, which the ministry says led to a 27 percent drop in the sale of pirated computer programs last year.
But the Business Software Alliance says that despite the crackdown on pirated products, total losses due to piracy exceed $120 million annually. And the Information Ministry committee has no enforcement power and essentially plays an advisory role.
King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) has meanwhile announced that the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property became effective on March 11 this year. The Paris Convention is one of the key IP conventions administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and provides for the protection of patents, utility models, industrial designs, trademarks, service marks, trade names, indications of source or appellations of origin, and the repression of unfair competition in all its 166-member countries.
Subsequently, a new copyright bylaw became effective on March 14 this year that aims at eliminating intellectual property infringements in the Kingdom. The bylaw incorporates stringent penalties on IP violators including fines of up to SR500,000, publishing the defaulter’s name at his own expense in local newspapers, and to compensation of copyright holders, in addition to termination of work permits if violators are businesses.
