ASIPI 2019: Protecting 'country brands'
How can countries effectively promote themselves, and how can businesses within them benefit from their nationality?
At ASIPI’s XXI Journadas de Trabajo in Lima, Peru, yesterday 29 October, panellists from Peru and Colombia discussed so-called ‘country brands’ and the opportunities that come with them.
As Luiz Diez Canseco, of George Washington Law school and former president of the Judicial Tribunal of the Andean Community explained, country brands are something with which we are familiar and but they are not legally recognised, at least not specifically.
A country brand is “not a collective mark, it’s not an indication, it’s not a mark for a state (all direct quotes translated from Spanish by the writer),” Diez Canseco argued.
Ivo Gagliuffi, president of INDECOPI, Peru’s IP office, explained the work that Peru has done with its country brand and the steps the office has taken towards gaining recognition for them as a separate type of mark.
Echoing Diez Canseco, Gagliuffi agreed that attempting to register a nation brand in the manner of a normal trademark is difficult and costly (since it would require registration in all classes and all countries), and that current methods of protection are “too expensive and insufficient”.
A country brand can have many different benefits, he said, and “can be used to position the country in a positive manner”, which can help tourism, but also commerce and the national identity.
Peru has proposed that country brands should be recognised at a global or regional level, and in 2018 submitted a proposal to the World Intellectual Property Organisation for establishing such a system, with five key aspects:
