DOMINICAN REPUBLIC - 2009 SPECIAL 30 REVIEW INPUT

UNCLAS SANTO DOMINGO 000256 SIPDIS LA PAZ FOR A/DCM STATE PLEASE PASS TO USTR E.O. 12958: N/A TAGS: ECON ETRD KIPR DR SUBJECT: DOMINICAN REPUBLIC - 2009 SPECIAL 30 REVIEW INPUT REF: STATE 08410 ¶1. Summary. Post recommends that the Dominican Republic remain on the Special 301 Watch List in 2009. Despite the approval of new legislation in 2006 to implement CAFTA-DR requirements, intellectual property rights (IPR) enforcement in the DR remains weak. While there has been a slight increase in enforcement activities against pirated goods as a result of recent USG-sponsored training, overall, improvements in protection have been limited. End Summary. -------------- CAFTA-DR Implementation -------------- ¶2. CAFTA-DR entered into force for the Dominican Republic on March 1, 2007. To implement CAFTA-DR requirements, the Dominican government passed legislation in November 2006 to strengthen its IPR protection regime, for example, by requiring authorities to seize, forfeit, and destroy counterfeit and pirated goods and the equipment used to produce them. It also passed extensive reforms to the industrial property law of 2000, which, if enforced should make it more difficult for the copy industries of pharmaceuticals and agriculture chemicals to thrive. Trademark infringement is now a criminal offense. However, the Dominican Congress abolished criminal penalties for patent infringement, a measure applauded by Dominican firms involved in pharmaceutical piracy. Patent violations must be pursued entirely through civil actions. CAFTA-DR mandates both statutory and actual damages for copyright and trademark infringement, measures that help ensure that monetary damages can be awarded even when it is difficult to assign a monetary value to the infringement. ¶3. CAFTA-DR requires that test data submitted to the Dominican government for the purpose of product approval be protected against unfair commercial use for a period of 5 years for pharmaceuticals and 10 years for agriculture chemicals. The Dominican government passed legislation to enforce data protection in November 2006. However, the implementing regulations have not yet been completed. As far as we know, data protection has not been granted for any product since CAFTA-DR entered into force. ¶4. On October 23, 2007, President Fernandez issued decree No.615-07, in which he ordered all public institutions to acquire legal computer programs. The decree also requires the Presidential Office of Information and Communication Technologies to establish a procedure for the registry of inventories of installed software and to determine how the institutions should acquire and use legal software. -------------- Enforcement -------------- ¶5. Pirated music, video, and software are all readily available in the Dominican Republic. Poor cooperation between various enforcement entities, in particular the Public Ministry (Office of the Attorney General) and ONDA (the National Office for Authors' Rights - "Copyright Office") presents a challenging environment for investigations and damages efforts to combat piracy, except at the level of street distribution. Investigations are further hampered by a chronic deficit of governmental funding, a gap that had been partially closed until the withdrawal of local representatives of the Recording Industry Association and the Motion Picture Association of America. Notwithstanding these difficulties, the Dominican copyright office carries out raids on audiovisual reproduction facilities, and reported having seized 671,139 copies of DVDs and CDs in 2008, which is more than double the 328,000 reported seized in 2007. ¶6. The Dominican government agreed in a side letter to CAFTA-DR to improve its efforts to stop television broadcast piracy. In 2008, the Government prepared quarterly reports on steps taken to combat broadcast piracy and submitted them to the Embassy and USTR. -------------- Training -------------- ¶7. In December 2008, the Embassy, together with the Department of Justice's Office of Overseas Prosecutorial Development, Assistance, and Training, held a multi-agency workshop designed to improve investigative techniques for IPR crimes. This training was a continuation of a workshop that was held in 2007 where DOJ assisted Dominican law enforcement officials to develop a manual on investigating and prosecuting IPR crimes. Workshop attendees included representatives from the Public Ministry, ONDA, the National Police, the Directorate General for Customs, the judiciary, and affected industries. As a direct result of this training, the National Police and ONDA have been working together to conduct anti-piracy operations. In 2008, USAID provided training to the Directorate General for Customs on IPR in trade which included topics on the importance of the safety and authenticity of traded goods; registration of intellectual property rights; anti-piracy mechanisms and infringement processes. BULLEN