From negotiating trade deals to educating on IP, the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines is facing challenges on a number of fronts, as director general Josephine Santiago tells WIPR.
“Given ASEAN’s diverse legal regimes and practices, and the differences in the IP development of each member state, negotiating as a bloc is a gargantuan effort,” says Josephine Santiago, director general of the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOPHL).
Santiago is discussing the challenges of the ten ASEAN member states in achieving consensus during free trade negotiations with third countries. In a major proposed trade deal, the Philippines and the nine other ASEAN countries—Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam—are negotiating the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership with six Asia-Pacific nations: Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand.
The Philippines, just one member of the ASEAN bloc, has an ethnically and culturally diverse population of more than 100 million inhabitants, so “gargantuan” is probably not an overstatement from Santiago.
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ASEAN, Philippines, IP development, IPOPHL, innovation technology, Asia-Pacific, free trade agreements, National IP Strategy, utility models
