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The Jamaica Intellectual Property Office (JIPO) is encouraging creatives to utilise its services to protect their work.

Assistant Patent Manager at JIPO, Jason Wongsam, in his address at the recent Jamaica Business Development Corporation (JBDC) Virtual Biz Zone, said that the facilities of JIPO are geared towards helping creators and innovators to safeguard their original ideas.

“If you are out there doing your creations, your innovations, you need to come to JIPO so we can provide advice and… you can actually go forward and say, I’m going to protect my trademark, I’m going to protect whatever it is that I need to do,” he explained.

Mr. Wongsam said that JIPO is placing focus on micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), which are key drivers of the economy.

“If we’re going to grow our MSMEs, we need to start protecting their intellectual property, so that they can move from being the small or micro entities to being medium-sized to large entities,” he noted.

Mr Wongsam said that JIPO is reinforcing the value of protecting intellectual property as the world continues to deal with the impact of the pandemic.

“COVID has taught us that everything is not necessarily brick and mortar anymore, there’s a changing and emerging business environment. There are now opportunities to offer some new ways of doing something or a technical solution to a problem, and what we do is we provide protection if you’ve come up with a new way to addressing that problem,” he explained.

JIPO is the Government’s central focal point for the administration of intellectual property in Jamaica in the areas of Trade Marks, Industrial Designs and Geographical Indications, Copyright and Related Rights, Patent, New Plant Varieties and Layout-Designs (Topographies).

Source: JIS

Author

Corporate Communications