Azerbaijan, Baku, Jul.13 / Trend G.Veliyev /
The Azerbaijani Agency for Copyrights submitted a package of proposals to the government to toughen sanctions for copyright violations, specified in the Code of Administrative Violations and the Criminal Code of Azerbaijan. A proposal on establishment of antipiracy plenipotentiary commission to struggle against piracy was also submitted to the government. The commission will include representatives of governmental agencies, author organizations and authors, Azerbaijani Agency for Copyrights Chairman Kamran Imanov told Trend .
Furthermore, a bill on ensuring intellectual property and struggle against piracy has been designed to regulate preservation of intellectual property right-holders' rights and to define administrative and judicial procedures related to protection of their interests and prevention of violations, Imanov said. This bill has been submitted to consideration of the parliament and it can be adopted by late 2009.
According to Imanov, the third chapter of the bill deals with struggle against piracy. This chapter outlines concrete norms in line with digital encoding of works, audio tracks and other intellectual property objects. The bill envisages issue of international identification numbers (ISBN, ISSN, ISMN, ISAN, ISRV and etc.) to control over one-time labeling with special series and numbers in each example of works (books, booklets, control software, audio-visual works, slide movies, movies, television series and etc.), audio tracks, collections and other intellectual properties, as well as encoding of books, periodicals, audio-visual works and sound recordings.
The law will prevent illegal use of IT. It is inevitable due to increasing rate of economic growth, and intensifying integration of intellectual properties into online trade.
At present internet has become a virtual market of intellectual property objects. About 50 percent of online sale is protected by intellectual property rights. Objects protected by authors' and adjacent rights play an exclusive role in e-business (three of four goods are objects of copyright) and it requires a special attention, Imanov added.
Identification of intellectual property objects through encoding will guarantee right-holders' intellectual property. Consumer will get a legal product and right-holder will be able to manage his rights more effectively.
These requirements proceed from the Agreement of the World Intellectual Property Organization on Copyrights and the Agreement of the World Intellectual Property Organization on live performance and sound recordings, which Azerbaijan have joined.
A law on intellectual property and struggle against piracy will successfully tackle the problems in this field.
Under the law, the court may pass a sentence to prevent counterfeit or pirated copies of goods, imported by violating intellectual property rights, to enter markets, and to make eligible persons willfully or unaware violating the intellectual property rights to pay a certain sum to indemnify the damage to the right-holder.