By Rudina Hoxha
The visiting President of the European Patent Office (EPO), Benoit Battistelli, who met with some of the Albanian state authorities on Thursday, said that Albania is making a progress in respect of developing its IP capacity.
Battistelli, previously the head of the French National Intellectual Property Institute, said that the EPO praises the fact that Albania has approved a new IP policy. “It is very important for the people to understand that in the very end, it is in their own interest to protect and use the patents in an efficient way,” he said.
According to him, “ an IP policy must be comprehensive and also have a dimension of fight against counterfeiting.”
Albania is a member of EPO. In your view, how has this country performed?
First of all, I would like to remind what EPO is. We are an European independent international organization which is composed of 38 member states. We are a very large Europe. We get the 28 EU countries as well as 10 other countries. If we get a map, we go from Iceland to Turkey and from Finland to Portugal.
Albania joined the EPO in 2010. So it is a new member. Since Albania has joined us, we have developed a strong cooperation in order to help it develop its own IP capacity mainly for patents but even for trademarks and designs in Albania. Progress is slow but in my view it is in the right direction. Albania has a new IP law and it has started to receive more applications. Our cooperation mostly consists of trainings in order to qualify IP specialists. We are also developing IT tools and IT applications which we have proposed to the Albanian Patent and Trademark Office to use them for free. In addition, we help in organizing meetings with the companies, inventors and researches in universities and to explain to them that the patents in particular are important to them and that they can be very useful tools to develop the IP-related events.
I am happy to be in Tirana for the second time. The first time I was in 2011 just after Albania joined EPO. I can see that in these 4 years, progress has been made and we are very satisfied with the cooperation that we have established with the Ministry of Economy and the Albanian Patent and Trademark Office.
What should be done to accelerate this cooperation?
I am not in a position to make recommendations. This is up to the Albanian authorities. But I think that this new IP policy which Albania recently adopted is a decision which surely goes to the right direction and will help to develop the Albanian potential. The situation in Albania is not so different from the other countries. If we look at the countries at this part of Europe or the Baltic countries, of course, there are differences but what is important is that for IPs, for patents, size is not important. You can be a very successful country in IP though you have a small population. The point is that Albania has to develop good links between industries and protect the IP rights in an efficient way. If people see that you can counterfeit products and you do not respect trademarks and patents and above all, no any measure is taken against that, people would be reluctant to use IP rights. So, an IP policy must be comprehensive and also have a dimension of fight against counterfeiting.
The patents are a great means to attract foreign investments in Albania. What should the authorities do to protect the patents?
I think being a member of EPO means for Albania that it has reached the best possible level in terms of patents that it can have. This is a very strong argument that Albania can use in order to attract foreign investments. You can tell to the foreign investors that in Albania, your patents will be protected as strongly as if you were in another European country. And I think this is a very strong argument. Of course, it is not the only one but it is becoming more and more important because the added value of the companies depend on the patents. We are entering into what is called a new knowledge based economy. Some people are talking about 4.0 industry with the dominance of internet and the elements of the artificial intelligence . In such a world, the only way to know what belongs to whom is the development of an efficient IP system.
