Azerbaijan Makes Slight Progress in IPR Protection in 2012

The Azerbaijani Copyright Agency, the State Committee for Standardization, Metrology and Patents and the Business Software Alliance (BSA) have recently released some IP-related statistics for Azerbaijan for year 2012.

Statistics released by the BSA show that the software piracy rate in Azerbaijan dropped to 87 percent in year 2012 from the previous 94 percent. Rufat Hajialibekov, head of the Microsoft resident office in Azerbaijan, said that the reason for the decrease in the piracy rate is the fact that certain state institutions, specifically the Ministry of Taxes and the Ministry of Communications and Information Technologies, had started using licensed software, in accordance with the agreement signed between the Azerbaijani government and Microsoft. He also noted that Microsoft is offering software at a 60-90 percent discount in order to promote the use of legal software in schools, museums, and libraries.

The Copyright Agency informed that it had approved registration of over 680 copyrighted and related rights works in 2012, bringing the total number of registered copyrighted works in Azerbaijan since the agency’s establishment to approximately 8,500. The royalties for the use of copyrighted works of Azerbaijani authors in 2012 totaled EUR 82,350 (USD 111,000), which is, according to the Azerbaijani news portal ABC, a very low income.

The State Committee for Standardization, Metrology and Patents stated in its report released in January 2013 that it had issued 111 patents for inventions in 2012; 105 of these patents were issued to local individuals and legal entities, while six were issued to foreign entities.

Prepared by: Aleksandra Pavlovic

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Source: Azerbaijani news portals ABC and newz.az