THE Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (Ipophl) will beef up its education and training campaign nationwide to further increase the awareness of Filipinos on intellectual property (IP).
Speaking at the PTV's televised program "Bagong Pilipinas Ngayon" on Tuesday, Ipophl Director General Rowel Barba said plans were underway to strengthen the campaign on providing more webinars, training and research conferences about IP filings, among others, for Filipinos, including artists and creators this 2024.
"This year, we will concentrate on a stronger enforcement system. So, we are actually strengthening our powers and initiatives to boost the confidence of the country's creators to register [their works]," Barba said.
"Awareness among Filipinos remains to be our main priority. We will strengthen the awareness of the Filipinos about IP because based on our observation, many Filipinos still don't know what IP is. Same goes with the country's artists and creators. They are lacking knowledge about their IP rights," he added.
The Ipophl official said that awareness holds a vital role in the country's performance in IP, especially for creators and inventors.
"We believe that we cannot encourage the country's creators and inventors to register their works if we cannot protect their IP rights," he said.
A total of 316 webinars, training and research conferences were conducted by the Ipophl in 2023 compared to just 200 in 2022.
He added that the increase was driven by reaching the rural areas, which he described as "difficult before."
"The good thing is we were able to pivot to virtual. Because of that, we were able to reach Filipinos in rural areas that we cannot reach physically," Barba said.
For this year, Ipophl has set a 10 percent increase in IP filings.
"We are still optimistic that we can surpass our performance last year," he said.
In December 2023, Barba said that the Ipophl already had 41,815 IP filings from January to October 2023, up by nearly 2 percent from 41,022 in the same period the previous year.
Utility models, Barba added, saw the biggest increase of 37.2 percent to 1,538 filings from 1,121 in the same period a year earlier.
This was followed by industrial design with 1,127 filings from 1,026, a 9.8-percent increase.
Moreover, patents also significantly grew to 3,612 filings, a 3.7 percent increase from 3,482 a year earlier.
Trademarks followed with an increase of 0.4 percent from 35,393 to 35,538 filings.
Copyright deposits, meanwhile, skyrocketed by 114 percent to 6,022 in January to October of this year, from 2,821 in the same period in 2022.