"I complain about Intellectual Property day": a cry from Venezuela

Richard N. Brown (De Sola Pate & Brown, Abogados-Consultores, Caracas, Venezuela) writes to tell IP Tango that Margarita Vilatimó Rivero, Venezuela´s Registrar of Patents and Trade Marks has posted on the website used by the supporters of the Venezuelan President her comments on Intellectual Property Day. ASIPI had organized a seminar in Caracas and the Registrar was moved to post her vision of Intellectual Property. You will note, Richard adds, that she attacks multinational companies and supports pirates! The text goes as follows:

"I complain about April 26: I complain about Intellectual Property day

Intellectual Property finds its roots in the perfection of legal texts that without doubt follow a model of capitalist society. Perhaps, no doubt, this condition has allowed us to state that intellectual property is a mechanism used by large capital to dominate the most deprived sectors of the worlds people.

It so happens when we observe the struggle of large multinational firms against the wrongly denominated “piracy”? This is, no other than the reproduction of musical, audio and video, or literary works. As a result of this absurd struggle against “piracy”? initiated by the large capitalists, our people have been deemed to be pirates or delinquents. It has been attempted to accuse the natural action of the human being to accede freely to culture and education, but incredibly, we all were shocked to view such a capitalist phenomenom that makes us slaves by impeding us from access to knowledge, technology, art, education, and culture.

The need of large capital to appropriate property which solely belongs to humanity because property is the result of cultural and technological values and the advance of history. It is an example of the existing savage neo-liberalism. It is for this reason that the Venezuelan Revolutionary, Bolivarian, socialist people ought to be aware of this fraud and ought to rebel against the laws that are not their own and that defenitively bind our conscience.

From the compact disc containing your favorite music to the medication that cures your cold, all are impregnated by intellectual property. The most famous top models sell their talent on the footbridge or pose in front of a photographer who in turn also sells his/her talent to the large emporiums distinguished by a trademark? Going over famous trademarks as “Victoria’s Secret? Even “Zara”?, these artists or performers depend on the millionaire contracts of large worldwide trademarks and consequently, they accumulate enormous wealth.

There begins a dependence that causes stupidity because while these large capitals, owners of those renowned trademarks, are concerned by using in the best manner both the model’s and the photographer’s talent, these in turn get rich in a kind of interdependency on the one hand to sell a lifestyle and on the other to condition the minds of that people that find inaccessible those products or services which they may desire to enjoy.

These are the bases of the alienation produced in the minds and souls of our citizens, who desire to posess an untrue life style transmitted by the media into those homes and places wherein this life style is impossible.

The need of our children, young people, and adults to possess products or enjoy services of a determined trademark which in turn are used by sportmen or sportwomen, the favorite actress or singer of that same youth, because it is mentioned in a TV spot or advertisement in television, press, billboard, or Internet, is what leads them to commit a crime or very serious mistakes, from robery to obtain money to acquire that life style even inducing them to kill to make himself feel he is the owner of the life style of others.

On the Intellectual Property day, on April 26, we saw a group of jurists and specialists preparing an event for April 27 on which it is intended to sell in a dangerous manner Intellectual Property to the Venezuelan people as a mean of achieving sustainable development? I ask myself sustainable? How?

Anyone who knows that monster called Intellectual Property knows that it is a mechanism of perverse domination exercised by large capitals over the peoples of the world. We must remember that thanks to intellectual property many persons in the world who are ill do not have access to medications because patents are no other than exclusive fees of exploitation that the States are obliged by Intellectual Property legislation to grant large multi-national pharmaceutical companies over technology translated into a medication. It impedes its access unless you pay high final costs.

And God pardon those incautious companies who may try to manufacture the same medication using similar technology, because there may fall upon them those important law firms represented by many of those highly paid jurists until having those incautious companies disappear from the market and erase that idea from their heads.

Now we are seeing the advances in intellectual property that the European Union has proposed on this fateful matter, each time more and more neoliberal. For example, they are proposing more time for protection and the exclusive monopoly of copyrights 70 years after the death of the author. They are also proposing to extend the term of patents 20 more years plus those additional years that pass from the filing of the application of patents up to the authorization of the commercialization of the product, a fact that is a deception due to the fact that the patent does not grant the product its commercialization, the commercialization of pharmaceutical products is granted in Venezuela by the National Institute of Hygiene Rafael Rangel abscribed to the Ministry of the Popular Power for Health. They propose to restrict even more the limitations and exceptions to copyright, with the possibility that these become absolute and not even for educational reasons, a text may be used and reproduced, because shall this be authorized, we would be in the obligation to pay copyright fees over every copy or public communication that we make of the work. They propose to restrict even more the use of data in those tests necessary for research to put into practice a medication, limiting the various States in their support of the manufacturing and production of generic medications by the National Pharmaceutical Industry, in order to lower prices and to facilitate its access.

Likewise it occurs with the copyright, where the authors, artists, and performrs are managed and manipulated in their need to subsist or to make their living from art, having to assign their rights to entertainment industry, large disc producers and publishers through the Intellectual Property legislation.

Consequently, these mechanisms, through which inventors and authors have works or inventions expropriated by legal entities that generally are the large aforementioned multinational companies, and are enhanced by a special law called Intellectual Property, and not satisfied with it, once these are expropriated, through meausures of intellectual property rights to be observed, the large capital impedes that the peoples of the world and even the creators itself of the works or the inventions accede to technological and cultural advances that imply these works or inventions, unless you pay a high price for its access.

If you do not do so, they call you a Pirate? or a Counterfeiter? of authentic? works. You may expect years of prison... then, please!!!, Intellectual property never can be considered a mean of sustainable development. It will be sustainable solely out of wealth and the accumulation of capital that only very few can make over the misfortune and oppression of the peoples of the world".