28 Aug 2016

Artists and performers have been urged to use the International Intellectual Property to register their work.

Speaking at a media roundtable held in Gaborone on Friday, Professor Doris Long of International Intellectual Property (IP) protection said people should know the processes involved in protecting their intelligent property.

Professor Long said registering their work would grant investors and authors the right to exercise limited and exclusive control over their creative works.

She highlighted that innovation remained crucial to long term success in the global economy saying it could create jobs for the naturally given people and thus their work needed to be protected.

She indicated that people had to earn recognition and financial benefit from what they invented or created.

Again, she said combatting IP infringement was the foundation of economy because it created jobs, promoted global competitiveness and could foster an environment in which creativity and innovation could flourish as well as diversified the economy through employments for artists, performers and producers.

She stated that IP protectors were relevant to entrepreneurs, hence a dire need for protection for use and as well as give other licence or permission to use their products.

As a result, she said they have partnered with Companies and Intellectual Property Authority (CIPA) to help artists.

Thus, she called on artists to register, saying IP could create a business assert to be used to develop oneself. 

CIPA director of compliance, awareness and client services, Ntesang Sebetso said they had engaged law enforcement agencies, particularly the police, in a workshop with the aim to strengthen their way of protecting artists and performers.

Sebetso thus encouraged owners, be it inventors, poets, musicians, literacy works, people with specific traditionally knowledge, art to come forth to copyright their work for acknowledgment when used by other people.

That, she said would assist artists to ensure that their work would not be tempered with or infringed.

Sebetso further highlighted the importance to register work for easy identification, so that artists were recognised and be protected, something she said was done on first come basis.

She mentioned that in some workshop, artists had complained that there was nothing much done to protect them. ENDS