'Indonesia still ambiguous about combating piracy'

JAKARTA (JP): An official said on Thursday that this country was still ambiguous about combating piracy of intellectual property rights, arguing that many small enterprises earned their profits from pirated products.

The Ministry of Justice and Human Rights' Director General for Intellectual Property Rights A. Zen Umar Purba warned that such a perception hampered the effort to protect intellectual property rights.

"Don't use vendors or small businesses as an excuse for not fighting piracy. The ventures may be small now, but they can become big," he told a media conference here marking Intellectual Property Rights Day on April 26.

Purba also pointed to the punishments for copyright violations which he said were unsatisfactory and contributed to rampant piracy.

He referred to the 1987 Law on Copyright which carries a maximum penalty of seven years imprisonment and/or a Rp 100 million (US$10,000) fine for copyright violations.

Many observers say that the punishment is too light because professional counterfeiters can pass bribes worth hundreds of millions of rupiah to law enforcers so as to avoid legal action.

Purba acknowledged that piracy was rampant in this country, with pirated VCDs easy to find on the streets.

He revealed data compiled by the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) which estimated that revenue losses from copyright piracy in Indonesia reached US$186 million in 1999.

"But our incidence of piracy is not the worst in the world," Purba said.

China, he added, topped the revenue-loss league with $1 billion. Even Malaysia ranked higher than Indonesia with $260 million.

However, Purba said, there were many things that we should be concerned about regarding this country's natural resources and locally developed technologies.

Scientists have called for a law on this as there have already been several cases in which organisms taken from Indonesia free of charge were registered by foreign companies.

"Honestly, we have yet to scratch the surface of this issue," Purba said.

Kartono Subagyo from the Ministry of Agriculture said that formulating such a law needed a thorough knowledge about access to natural resources.

"There hasn't been any concept of profit-sharing with villages, for example. I think we have to do our homework on this together," he said.

According to Purba, a bill amending the law on copyright, patents and trademarks is now in its final stage in the House of Representatives.

"We actually specified the rights (that could be registered) in 1997, but there have been some revisions made as there were a number of points that weren't fully resolved," he said without elaborating.

Earlier in December, the House passed three bills respectively on industrial design, integrated circuit space design and trade confidentiality.

Meanwhile, a specialist in the State Ministry for Research and Technology, Sulaeman Kamil, said that Purba's directorate general should be given a bigger budget to finance its programs publicizing such rights.

"The directorate general lacks a sufficient budget right now because all of their revenues from trademark registration have to be paid over to the government as Non-Tax State Revenue," he said.

The directorate general received some Rp 25 billion last year.

"Meanwhile, in Korea or Japan 90 percent of the revenue goes to the directorate itself," Sulaeman added.

According to Sulaeman, the directorate general and State Ministry for Research and Technology will cooperate to publicize registrable rights and thereby increase revenues.

"There are some strategic steps that we're developing, including an incentive system for inventors and also including these rights as part of subjects at university," he said. (hdn)