[Ecommerce] Impressions from a new consensus -- Harald Alvestrand notes from the "a2k" expert consultation

[James Love]

On February 3 and 4, CPTech, the International Federation of Library
Organizations and Institutions (IFLA), and the Third World Network (TWN)
held an "experts consultation" on possible elements of an Access to
Knowledge (a2k) Treaty.  The two-day meeting featured discussions of
dozens of specific proposals for such a treaty.  The archives and list
info for the a2k discussions are here:
http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/a2k/
http://lists.essential.org/mailman/listinfo/a2k

The proposal for an "a2k" Treaty gained prominence when it was embraced
in the Geneva Declaration on the Future of WIPO and included in the
proposal for a WIPO Development Agenda (DA).  The WIPO DA advanced in
the 2004 WIPO General Assembly, and will be evaluated in a number of
WIPO meetings from April to September of 2005.  Last week's discussion
of the a2k Treaty brought together diverse stakeholders and experts.
The following is the report of day two by Harald Tveit Alvestrand, the
Chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).  Jamie


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http://www.alvestrand.no/reiser/geneva-feb-2005.html

Impressions from a new consensus

Preparatory meeting for input to WIPO IPR deliberations, Geneva, Friday,
February 4, 2005

First impressions are strange beasts.

Wandering into this somewhat run-down, enthusiastically-placarded
"Maison des Associations" building in downtown Geneva was a very
different experience from wandering into the 60s-stylish, expensively
decorated lobby of the World Intellectual Property Organization
headquarters in the same city.

And the motley collection of civil rights activists, law professors,
representatives of ISPs and IBMs, 3rd world governments, free software
movements and less easily classifiable people in the white-painted
meeting room didn't seem like a committee with the power to change how
the world treats intellectual property - patents, copyrights, industrial
secrets and so on. One would imagine such changes being wrought by
tie-wearing corporate lawyers and high government officials meeting
behind security barriers, admission badges and visitor logs.

But this forum might still prove to be a significant reshaping force in
the way we treat IPR.

Context - where did it come from?

Recent years have seen a significant increase in the willingness of
industry to wield intellectual property as a tool - and a significant
increase in the public perception of their doing so.

The actions of the MPAA and RIAA against the "pirate lawless wild west
of Internet filesharing" has been the most written-about aspect of this
battle; less ballyhooed but perhaps more significant has been the
ownership of genes in GM crops, patents on AIDS medicines available at
prices only the rich world can pay, restrictions on the rights of public
libraries to lend out copies of works for free, attempts to use patents
as a means to hobble the free software movement, the various schemes for
preventing recording of TV broadcasts, and so on and so forth.

Where there's action, there's reaction - the 2001 Doha declaration
calling upon WTO members to implement patent laws in a manner "to
promote access to medicines for all"; the W3C's "royalty free licenses
only" policy; the EU and US lawsuits against Microsoft over monopoly
tactics, just to mention a few.

This particular group came from a campaign spearheaded by CPTech, IFLA
and others  - which led to a surprising success when Argentina and
Brazil introduced a motion into WIPO for a "development agenda". As part
of the job of preparing for WIPO's meetings in pursuit of this agenda,
this group was gathered to share information, ideas and possible ways
forward.

So what was this meeting about?

The theme of the gathering could be described as "limiting the harmful
effects of assertions of intellectual property" - striking a balance
between IP as a tool to protect the right to reap the fruit of genuine
innovation and IP as a tool to prevent others from pursuing different
opportunities and goals.

People present vere from various bacgrounds - EFF activists, professors
of international law, a man from IBM, a woman from BellSouth,
representatives from a number of non-first-world governments..... the
thing they had in common was having encountered situations where
intellectual property had been used as a weapon against themselves,
their causes or their companies. In many different ways - ranging over
the lawsuits brought against ISPs for "complicity" in filesharing,
getting a fair price for AIDS medicines for Africa, worry about the
ability of a patent holder to stop legal distribution of open-source
software, worry about the chilling effect of the fear of patent issues
on research and standardization.

The format was presentations focused around various - and diverse -
topics, and discussion around these.

  To wit:
=09=95 =09A panel where the most talkative member was Cory Doctorow of EFF
talked about deep linking and the chilling effects of linking policies,
as well as effects of attempting to make ISPs police their customres
=09=95 =09A panel where I was part talked about the effects of patents on t=
he
standards process - I described the chilling effects of patents
disclosed during the standards process, as well as the issue of
"submarine" patents and how the standards process is powerless to
prevent those from happening.
  A specific proposal on "forcing disclosure" was on the table, but
definitely "not baked".
=09=95 =09A panel talked about limiting what could be patented, including s=
uch
requirements as filing all genetic material involved in a public gene
bank, disclosing related R&D costs and assisting with knowledge transfer
after the expiry of the patent (this was plainly aimed at the
rights-to-medicines discussion)

I understood that the problems of libraries (which are heavily hit by
DRM technologies, which makes it impossible for them to exercise their
legally protected excemptions from copyright restrictions) had been
discussed the day before I arrived.

The last session was a "what now?" session - it was clear that the
rather diverse set of participants would have to organize their efforts
quite a bit in order to make progress towards influencing WIPO's future
events - the target envisioned was "shifting WIPO from seeing its
mission in terms of expanding the power of IPR to a mission that
involved finding a fair balance between IPR holders' rights and the
rights of others".

Next steps?

Hard to tell. Some specific proposals were put on the table at this
meeting; those need refinement and scoping in order to make sense in the
whole IPR contex; other proposals are needed to specifically address
other known issues, such as alleviating the chilling effect of IPR even
when held by "friendly" parties.

And the whole thing needs to be brought to a forum where the people who
argue for a more powerful protection of IPR are able to enter into
dialogue with those who seek to restrict it. A logical target is the
half dozen WIPO events beginning mid April through September 2005 where
WIPO will evaluate the proposals for change.

Watch this space.

Background material

  http://www.cptech.org/ip/wipo/genevadeclaration.html

http://www.cptech.org/ip/wipo/

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--
James Love, Director, CPTech, http://www.cptech.org

Consumer Project on Technology in Washington, DC
PO Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036, USA
Tel.:  1.202.387.8030, fax: 1.202.234.5176

Consumer Project on Technology in Geneva
1 Route des  Morillons, CP 2100, 1211 Geneva 2, Switzerland
Tel: +41 22 791 6727

Mobile +1.202.361.3040
james.love@cptech.org