A photographer spends days getting the right shot. A designer may spend weeks developing a visual identity for a small business. A software developer can spend months building something that works. Once the work is finished, however, copying it can take seconds.
That imbalance is at the heart of Bangladesh’s intellectual property problem. The country now has a growing number of people earning from ideas, designs, software, music, brands and other forms of creative work. But creating something valuable and being able to protect it are two different things.
Bangladesh has updated several of its intellectual property laws in recent years, including the Copyright Act 2023, Industrial Design Act 2023 and Patent Act 2023. The harder question is what happens when someone actually needs those rights enforced.
For a large company, pursuing an infringement case may be a cost of doing business. For a photographer, designer, musician or small entrepreneur, the legal and financial burden can be enough to make the fight impractical. That matters beyond individual disputes. If copying is easier and cheaper than creating, the weakness eventually shows up in the wider economy.
This is why intellectual property should not be treated as a niche concern for lawyers or multinational companies. For Bangladesh’s creative and knowledge based businesses, it is becoming part of the basic infrastructure of doing business. A filmmaker needs to know that a production can be protected. A software company needs confidence that its work will not simply be reproduced and sold by someone else. A local brand needs a realistic way to stop another business from trading on its name.
The laws exist for these purposes. Bangladesh is also a member of the World Trade Organization and the World Intellectual Property Organization, and its recent legislation has brought the legal framework further in line with international standards. But having legislation is only one part of an IP system. The more consequential test is whether an ordinary rights holder can understand those laws, register what needs registration, identify infringement and obtain a remedy without facing a process so costly or complicated that the right becomes meaningless.
That gap is increasingly relevant to Bangladesh’s economic ambitions. The country is no longer competing only through what it can manufacture at scale. Its businesses are building brands, software, designs, media products and other forms of intellectual capital. These assets may not occupy warehouses, but they can determine whether a business grows, attracts investment or enters an international market.
The issue, then, is not whether Bangladesh needs stronger intellectual property protection in the abstract. It is whether the system can make protection usable.
That concern was visible at a roundtable in Dhaka in May, where business representatives and US Embassy official Shilpi Jha discussed reforms to Bangladesh’s intellectual property framework, enforcement and the implications for investment and access to global markets. The discussion reflected a problem that goes beyond legislation: businesses need a system that works in practice, not simply statutes that look adequate on paper.
For that to happen, enforcement agencies need the capacity to understand different forms of intellectual property and act on complaints. Courts and administrative bodies need clear procedures and sufficient expertise. Businesses and creators need to know what protection is available before a dispute occurs, rather than discovering the law only after their work has been copied.
At the same time, stronger protection cannot become an excuse for protecting every claim at the expense of competition and public access. Intellectual property rights are deliberately limited. Copyright protects expression, not every underlying idea. Patents give inventors time limited exclusive rights in exchange for disclosure. Trademarks protect source and reputation, not a monopoly over ordinary language or an entire market.
The objective should therefore be a system that protects genuine creation without making knowledge, competition and cultural production harder than they need to be. That requires more than passing laws. It requires institutions that can enforce them, people who understand them and procedures that a smaller creator or business can realistically use.
Bangladesh has spent the last few years updating the legal framework. The harder work is making that framework usable. For a country increasingly trying to earn from what its people create, that is no longer a specialised legal concern. It is an economic one.
About Author:
Yusuf Ibne Humayun
Executive, TBD