[Ecommerce] 4 major US Library Associations endorsed Geneva Declaration

[Manon Ress]

This press release refers to the Geneva declaration available in French,
English and Spanish at:
http://www.cptech.org/ip/wipo/genevadeclaration.html

Subject:
US Assns WIPO release
From: Winston Tabb <wtabb@jhu.edu>
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 17:10:05 -0400
To: ifla-clm@infoserv.inist.fr

Colleagues:

fyi I forward a copy of the press release that will be issued by 4 US
library associations:  ALA, ARL, AALL, and SLA

PRESS RELEASE
September 27, 2004

Four major U.S. library associations today endorsed the Geneva
Declaration on the Future of the World Intellectual Property
Organization.  Together, the American Association of Law Libraries, the
American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries and
the Special Libraries Association represent the views of over 90,000
librarians and millions of library users throughout the United States
and abroad.

The Geneva Declaration calls for the development of a new agenda for the
World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) that recognizes the
importance of intellectual property for the future of humanity while
stressing the importance of balance in the laws and policies governing
such intellectual property.  WIPO must move beyond its original agenda
of simply protecting intellectual property to develop a new agenda that
promotes both international development and establishes new approaches
to supporting innovation and creativity.

In recent years, our library organizations have been concerned about a
number of trends that have combined to limit access to knowledge.  These
include, among others:

=B7    the lengthening of the copyright term which substantially delays
works from entering the public domain;
=B7    the development of legal protections for technological protection
devices without consideration of whether the circumvention of such a
measure would be done for a lawful purpose; and,
=B7    the efforts to develop new protections for databases containing
facts and other public domain material.

Our organizations believe that these recent efforts to expand
intellectual property rights have gone too far and must be brought back
into balance  The development of a new agenda will give WIPO the
opportunity to take a leadership role in re-crafting the necessary
balance.  In doing so, we urge WIPO to affirmatively seek to balance the
rights of creators with the rights of users.  This may call for the
rollback of recent expanded protections or the development of new user
rights to counterbalance them.  We also urge WIPO to deal creatively
with the issues raised by digital technology to provide appropriate
levels of protection while also supporting the rights of users to
effectively use the new technologies.

We believe that as WIPO seeks to develop its new agenda, it should:

=B7    promote the development of a robust and expanding public domain,
allowing new works to enter the public domain following a fair and
reasonable period of exploitation by the original creator; and,
=B7    establish accepted limits on the rights of copyright owners that
permit reasonable uses for legitimate purposes.

The development of digital technology has created a fundamental
challenge to the copyright system.  The creation of a new agenda is an
opportunity for WIPO to move beyond a protectionist approach to craft
balanced solutions to today's issues.  Our organizations look forward to
working with WIPO and the international library community to develop an
agenda that will both promote the protection of intellectual property
and, at the same time, encourage access to knowledge and international
growth and development.





--
Manon Anne Ress
Consumer Project on Technology
www.cptech.org
PO Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036
manon.ress@cptech.org, voice: 1.202.387.8030, fax: 1.202.234.5176