Azernews.Az

By Nigar Orujova

Azerbaijan is a leader in the protection of intellectual property in the South Caucasus, says the Azerbaijan Copyright Agency.

The recently published World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Index shows that Azerbaijan ranks 40th among 140 countries in intellectual property protection, the agency said. This confirms its leading position in the CIS space, as was the case in the previous year.

Azerbaijan leads the South Caucasus in intellectual property rights within the ‘Institutions’ of the ‘Intellectual Property Protection’ sub-indexes, despite a slight drop in status to 92th place.

Moreover, the country is one of three leaders in the CIS for the indicator, ahead of Russia and Ukraine, which are ranked 124th and 120th, respectively.

In the sub-index on ‘Innovation’ -- closely related to the protection of intellectual property -- Azerbaijan ranks 61th place as the leader in the South Caucasus and behind only Ukraine (54th place) in the CIS.

Azerbaijan is also is in 68th place among 144 countries in the ‘Creative products and services’ category.

On this crucial indicator of the level of copyright protection, Azerbaijan is one of the leaders of CIS countries, ahead of Russia by 10 points, Kazakhstan by 18 points and Ukraine by 19 points.

Azerbaijan is now on route to increase sales of licensed software, which will inevitably lead to changes in consumer behavior. The Center for Intellectual Property Rights under the Azerbaijan's Copyright Agency regulates the issuance of control marks for the objects subject to copyright.

The fight against piracy in the software industry is expected to truly influence the business environment in the coming year. These measures are expected to be tightened in 2016.

According to the latest report by the Business Software Alliance, the level of pirated software use in Azerbaijan is at 85 percent.

In late 2014, the Software Alliance reported that the piracy rate was at 87 percent. However, the agency said the figure is not the highest across CIS countries.

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Nigar Orujova is AzerNews’s staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @o_nigar

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