Al-Rawi seeking to establish Intellectual Property Authority

He said intellectual property is not new to this country but it is the one area of the ministry which earns revenue, adding that between 1996 and 2005 it earned about $18 million but this jumped to US$49 million between 2006 and 2015.

Al-Rawi was delivering the feature address at a ceremony on Friday marking the signing of an MOU between the University of Trinidad and Tobago (UTT) and the Ministry of the Attorney General and Legal Affairs. He said this country’s cocoa finds itself on British shelves as a much sought after product. He lamented that the country is under-exploiting the area of patents which has been in the single digits with low percentages of local patents being registered as opposed to foreign patents.

Al-Rawi said the MOU achieves the very thing that is missing - the marketing of the country’s intellectual product in a structured way which can redound to the benefit of the country.

He said the country has been talking about diversification but had not made as much progress on it because some might argue that the country has been afflicted with the curse of oil. He said the good news about being in the current economic climate is that it has to focus very sharply on the realities of diversification. Al-Rawi said the work that can be driven out of the exploitation of intellectual property is multi-dimensional.

He said one of his personal ambitions for the ministry’s Intellectual Property Office will be to see it develop into an Intellectual Property Authority which, he said, under a different formula would provide for its expansion as the IPO is well supported by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO).

He said between 1996 and 2016 it has produced a consistent revenue surplus despite being understaffed and under-sized before the two ministries were joined. He hoped to see the development of the Intellectual Property Office into an Intellectual Property Authority before the end of his term.

Also speaking at the function was Professor Dyer Narinesingh, President of UTT who said the MOU is a step in the right direction but instead of being consigned to a filing cabinet, he said people were needed to make it work. Narinesingh said that for this country to move forward it must stop thinking selfishly and get the private and public sectors as well as educational institutions and community based organisations to come together.