[Ecommerce] PC PRO: UN body promises greater recognition for open source licencing

[Manon Ress]

tp://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/64118/un-body-promises-greater-recognition-for-open-source-licencing.html

PC Pro October 5, 2004
UN body promises greater recognition for open source licencing 11:58AM

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is promising greater
recognition of Free and Open Source software licensing in a bid to
balance the needs of copyright owners and the public.

A group of Non-Governmental Organisations led by the Consumer Project on
Technology (CPTech) successfully lobbied WIPO in its 'Geneva
Declaration', resulting in a 'development agenda' that includes
alternatives such as the GPL.

CPTech's director, James Love, said: '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.'

The group had also spent some time documenting WIPO meetings in order
for the public to be better informed of the trademark, copyright, and
patent policies being adopted that affect their every day lives.

Cory Doctorow, Electronic Frontier Foundation's European Affairs
Coordinator, said: '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.'

The Geneva Declaration urged: 'We are witnessing ... hundreds of
innovative collaborative efforts to create public goods, including the
Internet, the World Wide Web, Wikipedia, the Creative Commons, GNU Linux
and other free and open software projects, as well as distance education
tools and medical research tools. ... Alternative compensation systems
have been proposed to expand access and interest in cultural works,
while providing both artists and consumers with efficient and fair
systems for compensation. There is renewed interest in compensatory
liability rules, innovation prizes, or competitive intermediators, as
models for economic incentives for science and technology that can
facilitate sequential follow-on innovation and avoid monopolist abuses.'
Matt Whipp--
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