p2pnet.net News:- There’s a need for balance in worldwide policy on trademark, copyright, and patents and the United Nation’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has finally acknowledged the fact.

In the wake of the Geneva Declaration calling on WIPO to work in the interests of all stakeholders, including the public,WIPO’s General Assembly has adopted a ‘development agenda,’ a kind of lens of public-interest considerations through which the treaty-body will view all future activities, as Cory Doctorow, EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) European affairs coordinator describes it.

WIPO has roundly resisted attempts to balance the interests of copyright holders, who make up the majority of WIPO participants, and the public, which has never been represented at the meetings.

Previous efforts to organize one-day information sessions on alternatives to copyright, such as the public-domain human genome database, the GPL software license that underpins GNU/Linux, and the Creative Commons project’s millions of ’some rights reserved’ books, movies, songs, and images, have been firmly rebuffed, with major WIPO nations applying enormous pressure to make sure the issue was never brought to the table.

The effort to get WIPO to officially acknowledge its stated mission of promoting creativity and "technology transfer" to the developing world was led by the Consumer Project on Technology (CPTech), with drafting assistance and support from the EFF and several other like-minded organizations.

CPTech and EFF are part of a growing movement among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have started to attend and document the WIPO meetings, exposing the negotiations to the public eye.

"For years, WIPO has pushed to expand the scope and level of intellectual property rights and told developing countries that this would help their development," says CPTech director James Love.

"Today WIPO supported an entirely different approach, which emphasized open source software, public domain goods like the human genome, patent exceptions for access to medicine, the control of anticompetitive practices, and other measures that have been ignored by WIPO for years. It represents a change in culture and a change in direction for WIPO. Many in the WIPO Secretariat opposed this, and few thought it would prevail, but today we are moving forward, on a different footing and in a positive direction, and WIPO will never be the same."

Doctorow said the growing presence of non-governmental pressure organizations at WIPO meetings is starting to have an effect, adding:

"The ridiculous IP-at-any-cost position of WIPO has been laid bare and revealed for a sham. Now the organization is taking its first baby-steps towards balance. In the coming months and years, the nonprofit presence at WIPO will broaden and deepen."

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See:-

Geneva Declaration – The Geneva Declaration

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 5th, 2004 at 1:47 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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