[A2k] Fwd: [Upd-board] UPD Statement to WIPO's PCIPD, April 15, 2005

[Gwen Hinze]

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>Subject: [Upd-board] UPD Statement to WIPO's PCIPD, April 15, 2005
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>Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2005 15:17:24 -0700
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>Statement of the Union for the Public Domain to the WIPO Permanent
>Committee on Cooperation on Intellectual Property Related to
>Development, delivered by Gwen Hinze, April 15, 2005
>
>KNOWLEDGE AS AN ASSET
>STATEMENT OF UNION FOR THE PUBLIC DOMAIN (UPD) TO WIPO PCIPD
>MARCH 14-15, 2005
>
>Congratulations on your election as Chair.   The Union for the
>Public Domain (UPD) is a non-profit organization that seeks to
>protect and enhance the public domain.
>
>The WIPO Secretariat report (PCIPD/4/2) regarding technical
>assistance to developing countries repeatedly describes activities
>that would extend private rights over knowledge resources,
>implicitly endorsing restrictions on access to knowledge as a
>strategy to promote wealth. There is another way of thinking about
>knowledge resources that points in the opposite direction.
>
>As IBM and other innovative firms are now discovering, in some cases
>it is the sharing of knowledge resources that does the most to
>create wealth and innovation.  A simple and powerful example is the
>Internet.  The development of open public domain communication
>protocols, not protected by patents, trade secrets or other
>restrictive regimes, provided the foundation for the most important
>communications platform of our generation; a platform that has
>generated an astonishing amount of private and social wealth.
>
>Governments and donors in the US, the UK, Germany, Japan, France and
>other countries supported a project to put the human genome into the
>public domain because it would be more valuable to society if nobody
>owned it, and everyone had access for free.   These governments
>acted to prevent private investors from sequencing and patenting the
>human genome.
>
>The US National Institute of Health now requires publicly-funded
>research to enter free public archives, because it thinks the
>information is more valuable when it is free and freely available to
>scientists.
>
>The theory of how wealth is created through public goods is missing
>from the WIPO technical assistance document.  This is a mistake.  It
>is not because a resource is free that it does not have, or create,
>value.
>
>WIPO needs to answer the question of the day - what should be free
>and open, and what should be closed and not free?  This debate is
>important for everyone, but particularly for developing countries,
>where students, businesses and others have few resources to buy
>non-free knowledge goods.
>
>Who are the people in the WIPO Secretariat who can advise developing
>countries on new open knowledge business models?  What publications
>does WIPO offer that explain the benefits of the public domain in
>supporting innovation or wealth creation?
>
>We ask Member States to call upon the Secretariat to produce a
>report which identifies areas where knowledge is more valuable when
>in the public domain, and freely available.