Abu-Ghazaleh: Finlandization, IP Fees Escalation and Trade Mode 5
31 Jan 2017
DUBAI- The 3rd Dubai IP Congress 2017, Gulf's largest Intellectual Property Conference opened its doors to participants with HE Dr. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh stressing that the world is witnessing the dawn of a new era in the IP history.
In his keynote special speech at the event organized by the International Intellectual Property Law Association (IIPLA), Dr. Abu-Ghazaleh discussed several key issues and inaugurated a three new Global Terminologies of Finlandization, IP Fees Escalation and Trade Mode 5.
"IP filings all around the world have been increasing over the last few decades, the year 2015 was exceptionally a good year while in 2016, we saw lower percentages" he said.
"On what I call Finlandization, everyone in this room knows Finland knowledge building economy. I have to say that Dubai is matching at a very high rate the steps of Finland. It is like the UAE in a technology race with the rest of the world. All this new developed inventions and technologies will be part of the Global IP legacy," he said.
“On IP fees Escalation, Dr. Abu-Ghazaleh believes that increasing official fees without increasing any other quality of IP prosecution and enforcement is really hard to understand.”
Dr. Abu-Ghazaleh stressed that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) needs to speed up the process of Multi-lingualization of the Internet in order to hedge against fragmentation adding that Chinese Internet is coming.
Dr. Abu-Ghazaleh focused on Trade Mode 5: trade in knowledge products and digital products which are wrongly accounted for in trade statistics as trade in services.
"The highest rate of growth in world trade is in Mode 5. In 2050, Mode 5 trade will represent one third of world trade. The GATS agreement covers four modes of supply for the delivery of services in cross-border trade. Mode 5 products do not fall under any of these. The Internet of Things (IOT) is coming," he said.
“Finally and most importantly, like all other industries and businesses around the world, there is a very strong need to a Union or Association of all IP organizations and association around the world and from this new global international powerful Union (or vehicle) will come a task force that will do advocacy work to address the official fees increase in our region with the concerned countries” he said.
