Bec's IP Awareness Training

This is a posting of work from our trip in October last year.

As many of you know, intellectual property law is one of my passions. So I was really excited to be able to marry my IP experience with my passion for Nepal to run a workshop in conjunction with the Nepal Trade & Export Promotion Centre. The NTEPC offers support to Nepali businesses which want to export their products overseas and they were keen to raise awareness of intellectual property issues amongst Nepali exporters. We ran an afternoon session for the co-operatives and associations as representatives of a broad range of industries initially. The afternoon consisted of 3 sections:

1. An introduction to NTEPC’s services, presented by Mani Lal Shrestha, Deputy Executive Director of NTEPC.
2. Intellectual Property and Its Benefits – An introduction for Nepali businesses, presented by me; and
3. Registration of industrial IP in Nepal, presented by Jiwan Prakash Sitaula, IP Director, Department of Industries.


My session had 2 main elements:

1. To explore the potential benefits of branding and IP for Nepali businesses;
2. To help Nepali companies avoid infringing other parties’ IP when they export their products overseas.

After the presentations, there was a very lively discussion of the role of government in supporting Nepali businesses in developing their IP and a round of questions about traditional knowledge and how it can be protected as this is a core competitive advantage Nepal has.

The afternoon raised a lot of interesting questions for me about the purpose of IP and its relevance to developing countries – is it a tool which is really only relevant to developed economies or could a country like Nepal have valuable IP which it could use in its battle to develop its economy?

As a result of this afternoon, I have been consulting pro bono to the Nepal Pashmina Industry Association as to how they can protect the pashmina name and brand.

We are now in discussions with the NTPEC and WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organisation which has been working with Nepal to help automate its IP systems, about running another series of workshops for different industries as well as preparing some training materials for the Department of Industries to use in its awareness raising activities.

We hope to continue to help Nepal protect its traditional knowledge and other valuable IP in future.

Bec