[A2k] Blogging WIPO: The New Development Agenda

[Gwen Hinze]

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[ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]
FYI for those following the WIPO Development Agenda, the first
meeting of the new Committee on Development and IP concluded on
Friday, with (at least in my mind) little concrete progress. However
Member States agreed to  continue discussions on an informal
open-ended basis between  now and the next meeting in July.


The full text of the Chair's Summary Report, together with notes of
the public part of the proceedings and my take on events is now
posted at EFF's Deeplinks blog:

<http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/03/blogging-wipo-new-development-agenda>

Thiru from KEI has kindly posted the documents that were in
discussion at last week's meeting:

<http://www.keionline.org/misc-docs/propositions.pdf>

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Blogging WIPO: The New Development Agenda

Last year the World Intellectual Property Organization adopted a set
of 45 ground-breaking proposals on how WIPO should reorient its
operations to foster economic and social development within its 182
Member States. The Development Agenda proposals are intended to
require WIPO to take a broader approach to promoting creativity and
innovation, instead of focusing exclusively on maximizing
intellectual property rights.

The Development Agenda asks WIPO to analyze the benefits of a rich
and accessible public domain, to protect a robust public domain when
it creates new IP norms, and to deliver balanced technical assistance
to its members, including information about the flexibilities and
options open to Member States to protect the welfare of their
citizens. The new mandate also requires WIPO to increase transparency
about its work, the consultants it uses, and the information it is
providing to its Member States as part of its technical assistance
programs. If implemented appropriately, the 45 Development Agenda
proposals could result in profound changes at WIPO and in the
international community's understanding of intellectual property
regimes.

This week was the first meeting of the new WIPO committee set up to
implement the Development Agenda - the Committee on Development and
Intellectual Property. It has been charged with formulating a work
plan to put development in the mainstream focus of WIPO's operations
and activities. Expectations were naturally high. At week's end, what
we can report is that there was only small progress on concrete
aspects of a work plan, and that Member States will continue in
informal open-ended discussions between now and the next meeting of
the Committee in July. The text of the Chair's Final Summary of the
First Session is below.

What is more interesting and ultimately more important, is the
procedure that governed this week's discussions about how to craft a
work plan to implement the Development Agenda. When the WIPO General
Assembly agreed to adopt the set of 45 landmark recommendations last
October, we believe the outcome it intended was the reorientation of
WIPO's institutional culture, operations and strategic vision to
facilitate the economic and social development of all of its Members.
That requires first, a recognition that change is required together
with a commitment to do it, and second, a means to assess whether
change is underway. Unfortunately, that commitment was less present
in this week's discussions.

On the first day of this week's meeting, the WIPO secretariat
circulated a a draft work plan, to fulfill one of the requirements
set by the General Assembly. The document contained two parts: a
Preliminary Implementation Report on the 19 proposals classed as
immediately implementable, with a table listing current WIPO
activities, and a Draft Implementation Plan for the other 26
proposals, listing proposals for new projects. It also distributed a
second document containing suggestions submitted by the Group of
Friends of Development, the Republic of Korea, and the Group of
Central European and Baltic States, respectively.

Most of the first two days focused on whether government
representatives should begin discussions with the subset of 19 of the
45 proposals that were classed as "immediately implementable" because
they did not appear to require additional financial or human
resources to implement (indicated in yellow here), or with the
remaining set of 26 proposals, for which the WIPO secretariat had
proposed activities that would require assessment of additional
financial and human resource costs.

This seemingly benign procedural discussion actually has great
significance. Discussions were focused on the list of activities
proposed by the WIPO Secretariat for implementation of the group of
26 proposals. The goal: to provide the Secretariat with a list of
projects for which it could produce a cost estimate. However there
was no consideration of any benchmarks or timelines to permit
evaluation of progress toward meeting the intent of the
recommendations. This is a serious omission. Without some type of
benchmarks and evaluation process, there will be no mechanism for
Member States to enforce their expectations for what should come from
WIPO's commitments,

In addition, there was almost no discussion of the second list, which
contains the activities currently being undertaken by WIPO in
relation to the 19 "immediately actionable" proposals. There was no
evaluation of whether the activities that the WIPO Secretariat is
currently undertaking are in accord with the spirit and intent of the
Development Agenda. This lead to the uncomfortable perception that
existing WIPO activities might automatically be considered to be
development-oriented, or as one Member State so aptly put it, that
this committee is engaged in an elaborate process of rubber stamping
WIPO's existing activities as Development Agenda-compliant.

All of this could lead to exactly the opposite of what the adoption
of the 45 Development Agenda proposals was intended to achieve. That
would be a grave manipulation of the promises of reform. WIPO could
end up doing more of the same type of activities, but there would be
no objective way to evaluate the impact or usefulness of those
activities for development, and no mechanism to hold WIPO accountable
for its new commitments. Meanwhile, any proposed development-oriented
activities might yet be vetoed on the grounds of cost (even though
WIPO had a budget surplus last year).

Let's hope that this is rectified with Member State input in the
informal consultations that will take place in the next months, and
that we see projects, timelines and evaluation criteria that clearly
evidence WIPO's commitment to change and accountability at the
meeting in July.
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Gwen Hinze
International Policy Director
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Email:gwen@eff.org
Tel.: + 1 415 436 9333 x110

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