This blogger wonders how, precisely, the system for copyright registrations works and whether it is a precondition for protection, noting that Azerbaijan has been bound by the terms of the Berne Convention since 1999 and that this Convention is not what one might call registration-friendly. The Agency's own website has a link to a web page titled "Registration of intellectual property objects" but, when clicked, it leads to a blank page. So too, sadly, does the link to the page titled "International cooperation".Since 2005, the level of piracy in Azerbaijan in the area of book publishing has dropped from 61 to 30 percent, in the area of audiovisual and musical works from 90 to 67 percent, while the software piracy rate has dropped from 96 to 87 percent [perhaps "dropped" might be too strong a word for what is, after all, just a gentle decline ..], Azerbaijani Copyright Agency Chairman Kamran Imanov stressed at a recent seminar on copyright protection in Baku, organized by the Copyright Agency of Azerbaijan and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
Imanov added that the Copyright Agency registered 21 copyrighted and related rights works in 2013, applications for which were submitted through the newly established online registration service. The total number of registered copyrighted works in Azerbaijan since the agency’s establishment is more than 9,000 [this doesn't sound like a large number, but presumably anything is better than nothing].
Azerbaijan is preparing national intellectual property strategy called “Azerbaijan 2020: Vision into the Future”, which will be presented soon. Part of the strategy involves possible amendments to the copyright legislation to ensure better online copyright protection.
Do any readers have detailed knowledge or experience that they'd like to share with us?
Article 5(1) of the Copyright Act of Azerbaijan (accessible in English at http://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/text.jsp?file_id=317315) states that protection is granted without registration. Many countries have voluntary registration systems, even though one should think that the business case for such systems is weak. Why should governments undertake such registration work when it rightly belongs in the private bodies managing rights? Such bodies need the information in order to manage the rights, governments do not. Maybe it is more a question of government officials who have other reasons for wanting to see their bureaucracy swell. The most important case for an official registration system would seem to be those countries where copyrights and related rights regularly are used as security for financing, but that is probably the case only in a few advanced economies.
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