Indonesia operates a copyright registration system. It is slow, barely searchable and costly. As it is voluntary and merely evidence of the ownership and subsistence of copyright, it is not used much. In fact it tends to give too much weight to registered copyrights over unregistered ones. Infringers sometimes use it to register spurious rights because it is hard to remove them. But it has some advantages, when you are on the offensive to add rights which might be less than strong in unregistered form.
A revamp of systems at the IPO is leading to an upgrade to the copyright system. Online filing of copyrights will come into effect. The IPO reckons it will speed up registration from 9 months to 2 weeks. The IPO office is using this as a test to start efiling more widely, for trademarks, designs and patents. That will take some time, but will hopefully help to reduce the massive backlogs as well as reduce corruption by putting payment online.
A revamp of systems at the IPO is leading to an upgrade to the copyright system. Online filing of copyrights will come into effect. The IPO reckons it will speed up registration from 9 months to 2 weeks. The IPO office is using this as a test to start efiling more widely, for trademarks, designs and patents. That will take some time, but will hopefully help to reduce the massive backlogs as well as reduce corruption by putting payment online.
Elsewhere, Singapore and Malaysia already have e-filing. The Philippines introduced it for trademarks, with online payment too. In Thailand there is an efiling system but manual payment and requirement of submission of hard copies renders it useful only for urgent cases. Vietnam like Indonesia still requires manual filing.
We are in the age of managing the entire invention process online. Starting from Invention Disclosure to Commercialization, even the Patent renewals worldwide done digitally. However, it's great to see the South-Asian IPOs acting on bringing in the e-filing systems. Way to go!
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