At the opening yesterday of the National Seminar on Intellectual Property (IP) Protection at Santo Domingo’s Plaza Naco Hotel, Commerce and Industry Minister Luis Manuel Bonetti called for the urgent passage this year of the IP reforms contained in the draft Market Regulation Code the Fern?ndez Administration recently sent to Congress. Bonetti explained that the Code provisions were drafted with the help of the Geneva-based World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the UN body charged with managing IP issues, with a view toward ensuring the DR’s fulfillment of its treaty commitments under the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Uruguay Round trade agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property ("TRIPs Accord"). The TRIPs commitment would require significant changes in IP protections under patent, trademark, copyright, software and trade secrets laws. As such, it will fundamentally change how a wide variety of Dominican companies do business.The seminar, cosponsored by the Industry and Commerce Ministry and WIPO, features a series of discussions and panels involving international and national IP experts and touching on the TRIPs requirements, existing international IP conventions and agreements, IP laws and experience elsewhere (particularly in Latin America), and what changes the DR’s regime must undergo. The Seminar is slated to conclude this afternoon.Meanwhile, in a press conference at the Gran Lina Hotel timed to coincide with the Seminar, the Dominican Association of Software Producers (Prosoft Dominicana), the National Association of Informatics Businesses (ANEINO) and the Association of Computer Companies (ASETEC) decried the high level of software piracy in the DR, which they claim is around 90%. They claimed the high piracy rates are hurting the development of the DR’s informatics industry, particularly its employment-generation capacity. Jamie Angeles, Prosoft Dominicana’s Executive Director, told reporters that "we’re not asking the government to do something extraordinary, but rather to enforce the law that’s been on the books for 13 years."
