[A2k] Oral intervention by FSFE to WIPO CDIP/3

[Georg C. F. Greve]

[ http://blogs.fsfe.org/greve/?p=3D333 ]

                 FREE SOFTWARE FOUNDATION EUROPE (FSFE)

                  STATEMENT TO THE 3rd SESSION OF THE

      COMMITTEE ON DEVELOPMENT AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY (CDIP/3)

                    (Geneva, 27 April =E2=80=93 1 May 2009)

Mr Chairman,

On behalf of the Free Software Foundation Europe please allow me to
congratulate you for having been reaffirmed as the chair of this CDIP
and thank you for your kind consideration in allowing NGOs to speak. Our
congratulations also go to the secretariat for their work on the
implementation of the Development Agenda, which clearly is being pursued
with constructive engagement.

We followed the deliberations of Member States with great interest, and
have a number of comments pertaining to issues related to Small and
Medium Enterprises (SME) empowerment, innovation, competition as well as
IT deployment by WIPO. Mindful of your our time we will limit our oral
intervention to issues of competition policy, but request to be granted
submission of our full statement to the report. The statement has also
been provided on the table outside this room.

FSFE sees a gap for the project addressing recommendations 7, 23 and 32
regarding the interface between exclusive rights and competition. As
discussed throughout the last Standing Committee on the Law of Patents
(SCP/13), exclusive rights and competition are strongly linked in the
area of standards and Open Standards for Information Technologies, in
particular. Due to the ubiquity of IT and its enabling role for economy
as a whole, these competitive issues leverage their effects into all
sectors of economy and are therefore central for the project.

We believe that it would be useful for this project to be connected with
the work of the SCP, and take into account the work of authorities in
this field, such as the European Commission's initiative for
Interoperable Delivery of European eGovernment Services to public
Administrations, Businesses and Citizens (IDABC).

Another relevant source of information are the findings of the European
Commission on abusive behaviour regarding standards in the Workgroup
Server market and the ongoing investigation regarding abuse of Web
standards. We also submit to the Secretariat that the records of the
European Court of First Instance (CFI) provide practical evidence
regarding a dominant vendor's attempt to assert exclusive rights as
grounds for refusal to supply competitors with essential
interoperability information.

Regarding the Global Meeting on Emerging Copyright Licensing Modalities,
we welcome the balance and inclusiveness that the Secretariat has shown
in its inclusion of Free Software. As correctly highlighted, the Free
Software model has been evolving over the past 20 years into a
multi-billion dollar industry for which Gartner Group expects an
adoption rate of 100% before the end of this year. We would therefore
submit that Free Software has already arrived in the mainstream of the
industry, and suggest that while it is still the fastest growing model,
it might no longer be emerging.

Thank you, Mr Chair.

               --- Statement by Georg C.F. Greve <greve@fsfeurope.org>
                            Free Software Foundation Europe, President

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Georg C. F. Greve                                 <greve@fsfeurope.org>
Free Software Foundation Europe=09                 (http://fsfeurope.org)
President                                      +41 43 500 03 66 ext 400
http://fsfeurope.org/about/greve            http://blogs.fsfe.org/greve