KARACHI, Aug 10: Copyrights are being used as trademarks by some traders to avoid action against fake products causing confusion in the market, lawyers dealing with Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) cases told Dawn on Friday.

Giving details of the anomaly, a lawyer said trademarks were meant for consumers’ products whereas books, art-work, paintings and musical work were protected through copyrights obtained from the Copyrights Department of Intellectual Property Organisation (IPO) in Karachi.

The Copyrights Department in Karachi is issuing copyright certificates for logos printed or embossed on packing of consumer products describing writings as calligraphy or artistic work.

It has been common practice that after having failed in getting their products registered with the Trademark Department, manufacturers approach the Copyrights Department and obtains registration for the same product.

The practice is on for quite some time and hundreds of products have been registered with copyrights instead of getting registry from the Trade Mark office.

It is interesting to note that both the Trade Mark and Copyrights registry are sister concerns and work under the umbrella of Intellectual Property Organisation set up in April 2004.

Lawyers of the manufacturers of affected products registered with the Trade Mark and whose imitators got their products registered with the Copyright department file a rectification appeal with the Copyrights Board which has not met since November 2005.Lawyers quote the Sindh High Court verdict in the case of Pakistan Drug House v/s Rio Chemical Company, which declared the practice as misuse of Copyrights Law. It directed for a proper amendment in the Copyrights Ordinance.

Lawyers said that the law-enforcing agencies were facing problem in conducting raids against manufacturers of imitation products as they present copyrights certificate to the raiding party.

Lawyers said India, which faced the same problem, amended the Copyrights Law to solve the anomaly.

Meanwhile, Col (retd) Faiz Mukhtar of Pakistan Intellectual Property Rights Solutions (Pips) said that Director-General of IPO Yaseen Tahir in a meeting had assured to check the practice of dual registration of products under IPO laws through an amendment in the law.

However, for an immediate remedy he has directed the Trade Mark Department to publish the applications for registration of both the trademark and copyrights in the Trade Mark Journal as an information to the trade.

The requests for registration are published in the journal for inviting objections, if there are any, from the affected parties.

He suggested that heads of both the Trade Mark and Copyrights departments should meet on a weekly basis to exchange data on applications filed for registration to decide about their jurisdiction.

The final solution of the problem, however, lies in amendment of the Copyrights Law, he added.

Insiders revealed that the since there was not much work at the Copyrights department due to small number of applications for registration books, etc., it decided to entertain requests for registration of artistic work or calligraphy printed on packing of a consumer product.

The practice did not only bring some work for the staff but also generated revenue.