The Committee for the Protection of Intellectual Property Rights of the American Chamber of Commerce in BiH (AmCham BIH) will celebrate again this year the Day of Intellectual Property Protection on 26 April, referring to the protection of intellectual property rights to protect creativity and innovation and to contribute to economic development throughout the world.
This is a day where governments, representatives of industries and consumers are called to participation in the promotion of the discussion about the importance of protecting intellectual property rights.
AmCham’s Committee for intellectual property rights welcomes the recently launched campaign of the Federal Administration for Inspection entitled “Still not too late-license your computer programs’’ and Inspectorate of the RS “Stop theft of intellectual property”.
“In February of this year AmCham organized a meeting at the US Embassy, where representatives of the competent inspection authorities in BiH attended, as well as representatives of the local IT industry. At this meeting, the importance of the effective fight against software pirating was once again underlined in order to create a more favorable business environment for the work of local and foreign IT companies. One of the conclusions was the implementation of the campaign, which would inform legal authorities in BiH that the use of pirate software would be subject to penalization, announced the President of the Committee for the Protection of Intellectual Property Rights in BiH of AmCham Mirna Milanović-Lalić.
She added that the AmCham’s IPR Committee continues to remain committed to promoting the importance of intellectual property protection, as well as to support the authorities in BiH in the implementation of their activities in this area.
The importance and effects of these campaigns is supported by data from studies conducted by independent agencies, for example an IDC study that was done at the end of 2013. It showed that one in three computers that are running pirated software would be infected with a virus by the end of this year.
Due to such virus attacks and malicious software users will spend 1.5 million hours and 22 billion US dollars on identifying, repairing and removing damages caused by the software, while it is assumed that global companies will spend 114 billion US dollars on resolving problems caused by malicious software.
In BiH, the piracy rate is 66 percent, and the IT industry in BiH, as a result of such a high rate of piracy, loses around 15 million US dollars a year.
