IRI pursues accession to world conventions on intellectual property

1391/02/15-08:30

A comprehensive bill on literary and art intellectual property has been enacted by the department of Legal Affairs and Intellectual Property in the IRI Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, a senior official said, adding that the Islamic Republic of Iran was pursuing to accede to international conventions on intellectual property.

Ahmad Ali Mohsenzadeh, the ministry’s director general in legal affairs was speaking to a panel discussion Thursday on the status of publication contracts in current regulations and in a draft comprehensive law on supporting literary and art intellectual property and relevant rights.

The panel discussion was staged in the main hall of the 25th edition of Tehran International Book Fair and heard, as well, from Pejman Mohammadi, an instructor with Chamran University, Abbas Husseini-Nik, lawyer and director of Majd Publication, and Ladan Heidari, moderator of the session, according to the TIBF press office.

The director general then criticized a previous law on copyright, approved in 1969 as lacking in providing clear-cut definitions and terms on intellectual property and related authorizations or requirements in transfer of patent rights or making a work public.

For his part, Pejman Mohammadi said an effective solution to protect the patent rights was to formulate and draw up precisely termed contracts in the field.

The university instructor maintained that intellectual property regulations are enacted in order to respect the time and costs spent by an author in developing a work, adding that minimum requirements must be levied on any publication contracts so that patent rights are duly fulfilled.

He criticized the current book patent regulations as biased towards publishers, urging for some modifications to the rules in place so that the publishers’ interests are duly protected.

Next, in closing remarks, Abbas Husseini-Nik touched on the 1969 ratification on book patents rights, saying that intellectual property rights were not limited to time or place and remain intact at any conditions while material rights, including the right of publication and circulation, could be transferred from authors to publishers.

The director of Majd Publication discussed the Article 14 in the 1969 Law on Intellectual Property, according to which an author may transfer the rights of his or her work to a publisher for maximum thirty years unless otherwise stated in a mutually agreed contract and after the period, the related material rights would be automatically transferred to the author.

The lawyer also briefed the audience on several modifications to relevant posthumous patent rights enacted in the 1969 law, saying under the previous regulations, thirty years after an author’s death, the material rights would be transferred to his or her heirs, and given there is no heirs, the government would collect the rights.

According to Husseini-Nik, under a modified version of the law, approved in 2002, material rights would be transferred posthumously to related heirs after fifty years.

“Intellectual rights however are permanent, fixed and non-transferrable,” he added.