Copyright will come, but with caution
The original intention was to have Belize pass its copyright and intellectual property rights legislation by the beginning of 2000, but the complex nature of the issue has lead the Attorney General’s Ministry to take a more cautious approach rather than rush the bill through. To help members of the public understand the issues, which range from patents to protecting music videos this week, the office of the Chief Parliamentary Counsel and Law revision is sponsoring a seminar. Representatives from the World Intellectual Property Organization, WIPO are talking to Belizean lawyers, musicians, writers, cable operators and media house owners about the implications of intellectual property rights treaties. Some of these are over a hundred years old and deal with the protection of literary, musical and artistic works, while more recent treaties cover satellite signals and broadcasting. Attorney General Godfrey Smith says Belize has to enact the legislation, but that there will be consultations with those who will be affected most.
Godfrey Smith, Attorney General
“Belize is a member of the World Trade Organization, WTO and in keeping with our obligations under WTO, we will be oblige to introduce intellectual property rights.”
Karla Heusner, Reporting
“Is there a revised time frame for that, or what will be phased in first?”
Godfrey Smith
“Well lets say that its, we are going to try to introduce it hopefully in the first quarter, if not shortly thereafter of this year of the year 2000.”
Q: “And will it cover everything, or it will be phased out?”
Godfrey Smith
“In the first instance, we hope to be able to cover copyright trademarks, designs and patents. The introduction of these bills into the house, don’t mean that they will be passed into law automatically. Let me go on record as saying, that it is a very complex and intricate business, there are many crinkles that will have to be ironed out, and we will need to get the feedback from the various stakeholders who are involved, artist association, cable operators association, broadcasters, members of the media etcetera. Hopefully when we’ve all organized ourselves properly into our respective interest groups, and formulated our positions and we’re clear as to how this thing is going to actually work in practice, then we can move along to implementation.”
Donna Ghelfi, WIPO Program Officer
“We’ve held various seminars explaining why intellectual properties is important to these countries its true, we’ve intended to concentrate on upon requests by the government on copyright issues, because they felt that there was a competitive advantage in that area. So I think everybody understands what copyright is. But we also try to explain that trademarks, patents, industrial designs are equally, if not more important, in terms of revenue, in terms of bringing in foreign investment.”
Ghelfi says Belize is the last CARICOM country to become a part of WIPO. The seminar continues tomorrow at the Radisson Fort George Hotel.
