'SMEs need to be told about intellectual property rights'

'SMEs need to be told about intellectual property rights'

Muninggar Sri Saraswati, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

In a bid to curb rampant piracy of intellectual property rights
in the country, the government will focus on raising small and
medium enterprise (SMEs) administrators' awareness on the issue.

Andy Noorsaman Sommeng, the information technology director at
the Directorate General of Intellectual Property Rights at the
Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, said that most SMEs were
not aware of the issue as most consumers were not concerned about
intellectual property rights.

"They think intellectual property rights is unimportant as
they do not understand its significance. It happens in almost all
parts of the world," he said during a seminar on Tuesday.

Some SMEs are often involved unintentionally in the piracy of
intellectual property rights here and they are not aware of the
legal repercussions for violating the law.

Utama Kajo of the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry
(Kadin) gave one example where many manufacturers of leather
apparel in East Java had copied foreign designs and trademarks
for their own products in an attempt to capture as much of the
market as possible.

"Don't expect SMEs to adhere to intellectual property rights
regulations during these hard times," he said, adding that the
government had also failed to support the SMEs.

Andy said that his office would provide accessible information
for SMEs and simple methods to facilitate property rights
registration in a bid to ease the pressure on SMEs.

Indonesia has several regulations on property rights,
including Law No. 19/2002 on copyrights, Law No. 14/2001 on
patents and Law No. 15/2000 on trademarks.

However, the implementation of these laws has not been
effective and the United States has kept Indonesia on its list of
most-watched countries for property rights violations since 2000.

The directorate said that this failure was the due to lack of
coordination among law enforcers. Early this year, the government
formed a task force comprising officials from the Ministry of
Justice and Human Rights, the National Police, the Customs and
Excise Office, the Prosecutor's Office, and the courts, but they
had yet to produce any results.

Relevant authorities at the central and regency levels have
frequently raided shops, kiosks and stalls selling pirated copies
of CDs, VCDs, books and computer software, but they are still
widely available on the market.

Pirated VCDs, CDs and cassettes accounted for Rp 951.26
billion in losses to the government's potential revenue in 2001,
the directorate announced.