A SENATE committee will discuss on March 1 a bill aiming to promote and develop the creative industries.
Senator Aquilino L. Pimentel III said the Trade, Commerce, and Entrepreneurship committee will conduct a hearing on Senate Bill No. 411 filed by Senator Maria Imelda Josefa R. Marcos in July 2019, which seeks to establish a charter for the creative industries.
“Arguably defining the creative industry is a crucial legislative process, there is a need for the most updated and accurate data on the creative industries in the Philippines… Truth be told the sector is broad and pandemic digitization even contributes to its diversification,” he said in a briefing organized by the American Chamber of Commerce in the Philippines.
“Hence, it may be asked for more specificity as creative industries have the tendency to overlap with other existing industries,” he said.
Mr. Pimentel also noted the rise in the number of content providers online as well as game developers.
“People now sell ideas, people now buy ideas, so if you want our creative industries to grow, we must empower our young entrepreneurs and we must capitalize on their creative ideas,” he said.
The bill sought to establish a Creative Industries Development Council to “formulate the development and promotion of original Filipino content and protection and commercialization of Filipino intellectual property.
It also provides for startup capital support via the council for creative entrepreneurs, as well as preferential loans, and subsidized rents, among others, in consultation with the stakeholders and in line with the National Creative Industries Plan.
Mr. Pimentel said that having a “consolidated job” for the council is better “than having too many collaborating government offices without well-defined roles or worse with overlapping jurisdictions.”
“Hopefully we can now avoid the situation where the government programs and projects are either duplicated, repeated or even contradictory,” he said.
He noted, however, that the function of the council in ensuring the enforcement of intellectual property laws should be studied and reconciled with the functions of the Intellectual Property of Office of the Philippines. — Vann Marlo M. Villegas