[A2k] CI/TACD statement at WIPO IIM

[James Love]

This is the written statement of CI and TACD, part of which I presented
verbally yesterday (we had 5 minutes to speak).  Jamie

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Joint Statement of Consumers International (CI) and TransAtlantic
Consumer Dialgoue (TACD)

WIPO Intersessional Intergovernmental Meeting on Proposal to Establish a
Development Agenda for WIPO
13 April 2005

I would like to congratulate his Excellency on his election as Chair,
and his colleague=92s election as vice chair.  I would also like to thank
the Secretariat and the member states for the flexibility they have show
with regarding to ad hoc accreditation for civil society non-government
organizations.

Consumers International (CI) supports, links and represents consumer
groups and agencies all over the world. It has a membership of over 250
organizations in 115 countries. It strives to promote a fairer society
through defending the rights of all consumers, especially the poor,
marginalized and disadvantaged.  The TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue
(TACD) is a coalition of 65 consumers associations in the United States
and Europe.   Many members of both CI and TACD are also actively
involved in the publishing of magazines, books, newsletter and Web
pages.  This statement represents the views of CI and TACD.

CI and TACD hosted a 2003 meeting in Lisbon on the WIPO Work Program,
and TACD hosted a September 2004 meeting in Geneva on the Future of
WIPO.  We are among the hundreds of groups and leading experts who have
endorsed the Geneva Declaration on the Future of WIPO.

We support the thoughtful and far reaching proposal by the Friends of
Development (FoD) for a development agenda.  We seek a change of
direction in WIPO, in terms of the mission, the management of the agency
and the work program.

Rules concerning knowledge as intellectual property should support
creative activity, innovation and development, while respecting human
rights and the need for consumer protection.

We are concerned that WIPO is out of touch with modern thinking about
innovation.  The debates about intellectual property protection are
often too ideological, and focused on unproven and sometimes untrue
assertions regarding the benefits of extending intellectual property
protection, with insufficient attention to the costs that such systems
can impose on society.

Today many innovative businesses are engaged in a debate of the proper
role of intellectual property in supporting innovation.  Many large
pharmaceutical companies created the SNPS consortium to develop an open
source/public domain scientific database of genetic information.  The
Internet relies upon open standards, created through bodies such as the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C), and free software programs.  IBM has announced it is changing its
thinking about the patent policy, which it describes as out of control
in the United States.  The New York Times reported on Monday that
=93companies in industry after industry are also reconsidering their
strategies on intellectual property:  what do you share?  What do you
keep proprietary?=94  Even Microsoft is beginning to share some software
code and is alarmed at the inability the US government to properly
evaluate software patents.  The US Chamber of Commerce is a leading
opponent of a new law on databases, and the European Commission is
considering whether it should modify or eliminate its databases
directive, which some consider to have been a mistake that harms
innovation.  New innovative businesses like Google provide services that
vastly expand access to knowledge, but which could not operate without
limitations and exceptions to the exclusive rights of copyright holders.

There are many new proposals to finance innovation.  For example, the US
Congress is considering HR 417, the Medical Innovation Prize Fund, which
is a legislative proposal for financing drug development.  This proposal
recognizes the need for incentives to invest in new medicines, but
through a new paradigm that separates the market for innovation from the
market for the products.  New medicines would become generic products,
priced at the cost of manufacturing and distribution, while (successful)
developers of new medicines would be remunerated from a $60 billion per
year Medical Innovation Prize Fund, (50 basis points of US GDP) over a
10-year period of time, based upon evidence of incremental health care
benefits.  Some have proposed new policies on government procurement of
software that would promote open interfaces and interoperability of
software.  There are new "author pay" open access publishing models for
scholarly scientific research, which have been endorsed by some of the
most important funders of such research.

WIPO should be aware of and be learning from new approaches to
innovation.  WIPO must be free to innovate itself, and should not be
bound to an outdated and thought-free mission of promoting endless
expansions of intellectual property rights, regardless of their
consequences. The new intellectual property rules should support and not
undermine business models and innovation incentives that promote access
to knowledge.

We note that intellectual property systems can be characterized as a
system of regulation of knowledge.  Like other forms of regulation, it
presents the risk of regulatory capture, through the lobbying activities
of groups who want protections from competition or otherwise engaged in
rent seeking at the expense of the public interest.

We agree with the FoD that WIPO should halt efforts to harmonize global
standards of patentability, given the problematic state of patent policy
in the United States or Europe.  WIPO should not promote the unnecessary
and harmful proposal for a treaty for broadcasting and webcasting
organizations, and it should not promote a treaty on protection of
databases.  WIPO should instead address areas where it can solve well
known problems and abuses of the patent system.

The WIPO Standing Committee on Patents should consider the following
agenda items:

1.  Identify a more constructive and productive role for WIPO to address
the growing concern over patent quality, including analysis of the
causes of poor patent quality, and the various strategies to eliminate
poor quality patents.

2.  Address the proposals by the World Health Organization to address
patent transparency in developing countries,

3.  Address the appropriate implementation of paragraph 4 of the WTO
Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health,

4.  Review implementation of Article 40 of the TRIPS regarding the
control of anticompetitive practices,

5.  Address the problems faced by standards organizations, and in
particular, those that involve essential interfaces for knowledge goods,
such as software or Internet standards.

The WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR)
should focus on agenda items such as:

1.  The Chilean proposal to discuss the implementation of TRIPS
flexibilities to protect the visually impaired, libraries, educators,
and others.

2.  Essential limitations and exceptions that are necessary to protect
the Internet, including search engines.

3.  Access to government funded research.

4.  New voluntary mechansims to promote access to knowledge, such as the
creative commons, or the sharing of the BBC archives.

5.  Implementation of Article 40 of the TRIPS as it relates to
copyrighted goods,

6.  Control of anticompetitive practices in the areas such as software,
academic and scholarly journals, or the distribution of music,

7.  The use of government procurement or other measures to promote open
interfaces for essential knowledge goods,

8.  The impact of technological protection measures and digital rights
management system on consumers.

We support the proposal for a treaty on access to knowledge (a2k), and
recommend that the Standing Committee on Patents (SCP) and the Standing
Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) discuss the possible
elements of such a treaty.   Among the topics that should be discussed
are minimum limitations and exceptions to patents and copyrights, open
access archives for publicly funded research, government procurement
policies that support open software interfaces.

We anticipate providing further submissions to the IIM on these topics,
including an elaboration of the possible elements of a treaty on access
to knowledge.


--
James Love, Director, CPTech, http://www.cptech.org

Consumer Project on Technology in Washington, DC
PO Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036, USA
Tel.:  1.202.387.8030, fax: 1.202.234.5176

Consumer Project on Technology in Geneva
1 Route des  Morillons, CP 2100, 1211 Geneva 2, Switzerland
Tel: +41 22 791 6727

Mobile +1.202.361.3040
james.love@cptech.org