KG Labs Submits Recommendations to Kyrgyzpatent on IP Registration and Digital Access, April 2019
In April 2019, KG Labs submitted a formal letter of recommendations to the leadership of Kyrgyzpatent — the State Agency on Intellectual Property and Innovation — identifying three operational problems affecting the IT sector’s engagement with intellectual property registration, and proposing specific steps to address each. The letter was signed by KG Labs chairman Aziz Soltobaev and project and communications manager Begaim Muratbekova. It drew on observations gathered through KG Labs’ hackathons, developer forums, and ecosystem-mapping work, and reflected back to Kyrgyzpatent what IT practitioners had described as their specific friction points with the agency.
Three Problems, Three Recommendations
The first problem identified in the letter was the lack of accessible information about the procedures, conditions, and rules for IP registration. Practitioners encountering Kyrgyzpatent for the first time — typically software developers or small studios with a product they wanted to protect — found the available guidance insufficient to navigate the process independently. The recommendation was twofold: a series of joint events between KG Labs and Kyrgyzpatent targeted at the IT sector, and a proactive public information campaign.
The second problem was more structural. IT specialists trying to protect software products were encountering procedural difficulty in the patent registration process and, as a result, were defaulting to copyright registration (авторство) instead. Copyright and patent protection are different instruments with different reach: copyright establishes authorship of an existing work; a patent protects an invention from being independently replicated by others. For a software product, particularly one with a novel technical mechanism, the inability to obtain patent protection is a meaningful competitive disadvantage. The letter recommended that Kyrgyzpatent simplify and update its patent registration procedures to make them practically accessible to the IT sector.
The third problem was payment modernisation. The letter noted that the process of obtaining and paying for Kyrgyzpatent services needed to be updated to reflect how payments were being made across the rest of the digital economy. The specific recommendations were to add internet acquiring for Visa and Elcart card payments to Kyrgyzpatent’s website and applications, and to enable payment for agency services through payment terminals and electronic wallets. The Interbank Processing Center and the national payment system Elcart — the same infrastructure KG Labs had been discussing in the FinTech events series since September 2018 — were explicitly named as the relevant instruments.
Broader Context: Taza Koom and Innovation Policy
The Kyrgyzpatent letter sat within a broader set of policy engagement KG Labs was conducting in 2019. The supporting archive for this partnership includes Kyrgyzpatent’s own concept documents on the intellectual property development framework, an action plan developed within the Taza Koom national digital transformation programme, a government interministerial working group order, and a set of UNECE policy recommendations on innovation in Kyrgyzstan from 2018. Together these documents show Kyrgyzpatent in the process of trying to update its mandate for a digital economy — an agency that had been built around industrial patents and trademarks and was now being asked to also be the institutional home for software, digital content, and innovation policy more broadly.
KG Labs’ letter to Kyrgyzpatent was a practitioner-facing contribution to that process: three specific, actionable observations from people who had watched IT specialists navigate the agency, handed directly to the agency’s leadership. By April 2019 KG Labs was engaging not only with private-sector ecosystem building — hackathons, accelerators, event series — but also with the public-sector institutions whose procedures shaped what the IT sector could and could not do.
Details
| Document | Letter of recommendations to Kyrgyzpatent leadership |
| Date | April 23, 2019 |
| From | Aziz Soltobaev (chairman, KG Labs) and Begaim Muratbekova (project and communications manager, KG Labs) |
| Recipient | Leadership of Kyrgyzpatent (State Agency on Intellectual Property and Innovation) |
| Recommendations | 1. Joint events and public campaigns to inform the IT sector about IP registration; 2. Simplify patent registration procedures for software; 3. Add Visa/Elcart internet acquiring and e-wallet payment options to Kyrgyzpatent services |
| Evidence base | Observations from KG Labs hackathons, developer forums, and ecosystem mapping |
