[Ecommerce] Web LinuxElectrons: WIPO Announces Plans to Support Public Domain, Open Source

[Manon Ress]

http://www.linuxelectrons.com/article.php/20041004215722422
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WIPO Announces Plans to Support Public Domain, Open Source

Monday, October 04 2004 @ 09:57 PM
Contributed by: ByteEnable

General News The United Nation's (UN's) World Intellectual Property
Organization (WIPO) has adopted a "development agenda" that acknowledges
the need for balance in worldwide policy on trademark, copyright, and
patents. In the past, WIPO has been roundly resistant to attempts to
balance the interests of copyright holders, who make up the majority of
WIPO participants, and the public, which had never been represented at
the meetings.

Previous efforts to get WIPO to hold one-day information sessions on
alternatives to copyright -- such as the public-domain human genome
database, the GPL software license that underpins GNU/Linux, and the
Creative Commons project's millions of "some rights reserved" books,
movies, songs, and images -- has been firmly rebuffed, with major WIPO
nations applying enormous pressure to see to it that the issue was never
brought to the table.

Now, in the wake of the "Geneva Declaration" -- a document calling on
WIPO to work in the interest of all of its stakeholders, including the
public -- WIPO's General Assembly has adopted a "development agenda," a
kind of lens of public-interest considerations through which the
treaty-body will view all future activities.

The effort to get WIPO to officially acknowledge its stated mission of
promoting creativity and "technology transfer" to the developing world
was led by the Consumer Project on Technology (CPTech), with drafting
assistance and support from Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and
several other like-minded organizations. CPTech and EFF are part of a
burgeoning movement among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that
have started to attend and document the WIPO meetings, exposing the
negotiations to the public eye.

CPTech's director, James Love, remarked: "For years, WIPO has pushed to
expand the scope and level of intellectual property rights and told
developing countries that this would help their development. Today WIPO
supported an entirely different approach, which emphasized open source
software, public domain goods like the human genome, patent exceptions
for access to medicine, the control of anticompetitive practices, and
other measures that have been ignored by WIPO for years. It represents a
change in culture and a change in direction for WIPO. Many in the WIPO
Secretariat opposed this, and few thought it would prevail, but today we
are moving forward, on a different footing and in a positive direction,
and WIPO will never be the same."

Said Cory Doctorow, EFF's European Affairs Coordinator, "The growing
presence of non-governmental pressure organizations like CPTech and EFF
at WIPO's meetings has begun to take its toll. The ridiculous
IP-at-any-cost position of WIPO has been laid bare and revealed for a
sham. Now the organization is taking its first baby-steps towards
balance. In the coming months and years, the nonprofit presence at WIPO
will broaden and deepen -- we won't let them fool us any longer."







--
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