The EU is committed to further protection of Intellectual and Industrial Property Rights as the driving force of innovation
On March 1, the EU Council of Ministers reached an agreement on adopting a resolution for enforcing Intellectual Property rights in the internal market. Negotiations on the resolution began and concluded in the first quarter of 2010, thereby becoming one of the first successes of the Union’s Spanish presidency.
The before-mentioned resolution aims at making progress in the area of protecting Intellectual Property. In order to do so, by acknowledging and assigning full EU support to this area, progress is made in the fundamental areas of this protection, such as recognizing the need to face challenges within a rapidly growing digital environment; the importance of the recently created European Observatory on Counterfeiting and Piracy -whose role, capabilities and tasks must be carried out-, and encouraging member states, patent holders and consumer associations, among others, to actively participate in the work performed by the previously-mentioned Observatory.
The Resolution also covers basic aspects involving the fight against the trend, as well as the need for access to reliable and comparable data at the European level, encouraging the development of a common methodology for gathering this data. This includes the utmost importance of making the public sufficiently aware of this; encouraging member states and patent holders to conduct awareness campaigns and analyze their impact; the importance of setting up simplified procedures among EU countries for carrying out legal decisions with the aim of ensuring the proper protection of Intellectual Property rights at the European level; as well as analyzing the possibility of resuming negotiations on the Directive for Penal Sanctions on Industrial Property within the new framework created by the Treaty of Lisbon.
The resolution underlines some of the significant tasks that the European Observatory must perform, including calling customary meetings among experts in the field, compiling best practices, publishing an annual report on the scope, scale and main characteristics of counterfeiting and piracy, and its impact on the internal market. This also includes promoting training on this material at the European level, while work performed by the Observatory could extend into studying the causes, consequences and effects that violating Intellectual Property rights has on innovation, competitiveness, job markets, security and other areas within the internal market.
Lastly, the importance that the resolution gives to supporting and advising SME’s should be pointed out, along with that of strengthening communication among patent holders with the aim of reaching voluntary agreements for reducing counterfeiting and piracy.
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