WIPO and intellectual property issues
The Intellectual Property Division (DIPI) in coordination with other bodies with competence in this matter is in charge of the Brazilian government’s position in international discussions and negotiations on intelectual property, in organizations including the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), the World Trade Organization (WTO) TRIPS Council, the World Customs Organization (WCO) Counterfeiting and Piracy (CAP) Group, among others.
At WIPO’s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR), the Brazilian delegation has proposed an international agreement limiting copyright on published works for persons who are blind or visually impaired. This proposal has led to the adoption in 2013 of the Marrakesh Treaty, which entered into force in 2015 and is one of the most important instruments ratified by the Organization in its recent history.
Another important outcome for Brazil arising from international negotiations on intellectual property was the country’s recent accession to the Madrid Protocol, bringing us into the Madrid System (through which trademarks can be registered and protected in multiple countries) after a hiatus of more than eighty years (Brazil was a party to the original Madrid Agreement but denounced it in 1934). Brazil’s membership brings advantages to Brazilian trademark holders who seek to internationalize their activities and to foreign investors in Brazil, who will see their costs reduced.
Brazil has been warning about the need for governments to act in the copyright regulation in the online environment. Brazil has pointed to three urgent distortions that would need to be corrected: the extraterritoriality of contracting services such as streaming, which goes against the logic of intellectual property rights protection (a Brazilian consumer can pay for a service such as Spotify in the USA with an international credit card and use it in Brazil to listen to Brazilian music only); the sharing of proceeds from sales, which have harmed composers for the benefit of record companies and publishers that give out their catalogs (and which are often controlled by the same group controlling the streaming service); and the legal nature of services offered, which can be regarded as either private or public (in the latter case it would be subject to the supervision of collective management bodies such as the Central Collection Office - ECAD).
Brazil supports, at the WTO, the revision of the TRIPS Agreement (on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property) so that the agreement will incorporate aspects of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), especially those that determine the sharing of benefits with holders of traditional knowledge as in the case of intellectual property rights obtained from this heritage. The Brazilian legislation provides for benefit-sharing since the beginning of the 2000s and was amended as of 2015 with the aim of facilitating the research, registration and calculation of benefits to be shared.
Brazilian delegations continue to advocate, in multiple competent multilateral forums, the need to consciously use patent flexibilities in order to guarantee access to medicines and the sustainability of public healthcare systems, especially the universal ones, such as the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS). One of the most important initiatives in this regard and which has always had the support of Brazil is the revision of the TRIPS Agreement with a view to enable the implementation of paragraph 6 of the 2001 Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health, which allows for the import of generic medicines produced through compulsory licensing by countries with no manufacturing capacities.
Brazil is negotiating, in the context of conversations initiated with other countries and blocs, the signing of association agreements, the mutual protection of geographical indications (names of products recognized and protected as being characteristic of a region or country, such as champagne). At the same time, several Brazilian government agencies, including the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply, the Ministry of Economy, the Brazilian Micro and Small Business Support Service (Sebrae), and the National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) have worked to expand protection as well as foreign and domestic markets of Brazilian geographical indications. INPI has recognized more than 50 indications of source and appellations of origin for national products. At the international level, Brazil and Mexico have signed an agreement on the mutual recognition of tequila and cachaça as typical products of each country respectively. Internal legal procedures related to the agreement were concluded in 2018. Regulations on the use of the GI ‘cachaça’, which will allow its recognition as a product typical of Brazil in several markets, was approved in 2016 by the Foreign Trade Chamber (Camex).