Peruvian Ministry of Production hires Durand Abogados

The Government of Peru, through its Ministry of Production, has hired Durand Abogados in order to develop on national scale a mid and long term project to provide a solution to small and medium enterprises in Peru, allowing them to protect their Intellectual Property, in particular Geographic Indications, Collective Marks, among others.

In the past years, together with the growing economy in Peru, different types of enterprises have developed. As a result of this process, in Peru more than 3 200 000 enterprises are small sized enterprises and about 50 000 are medium sized enterprises and it is the small and medium sized entrepreneurship that generates 80% of the jobs in Peru. Further, also illustrative of this process is the fact that around 90% of the entirety of production units in Peru is constituted by small and medium sized enterprises and they contribute with more than 35% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Peru. Individually these enterprises have difficulties to access to expensive protection of IP rights; however, they may acquire such protection by sharing the costs through gathering.

It is the goal of our project to create and provide different solutions which are sought to help to inform in a simple way small and medium sized entrepreneurs about the menu of protection possibilities available in IP and how to obtain this protection on a low budget basis, using for example Collective Marks.

Collective marks are usually defined as signs which distinguish the geographical origin, material, modes of production or other common characteristics of goods or services of different enterprises using the collective mark. The owner may be either an association of which small or medium enterprises are members or any other entity, including a public institution or a cooperative.

The project also involves ways and mechanisms to avoid the misappropriation of national IP rights by third parties.

Under the auspices of the Ministry of Production of Peru this major project is the first systematic attempt in Peru to “democratize” IP practices and knowledge amongst the Peruvian small and medium sized entrepreneurship.