[Ecommerce] Cory Doctorow The Worldchanging interview

[Manon Ress]

<http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003214.html>

JULY 30, 2005
CORY DOCTOROW: THE WORLDCHANGING INTERVIEW
WorldChanging Interviews


The World Intellectual Property Organization is one of those
incredibly important international bodies of which most of us have
never heard. Cory Doctorow, besides being a bull goose blogger and
science fiction writer, is one of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation's key activists, trying to get WIPO to become more
responsive to the needs of average citizens, especially in the
developing world. Here Cory talks about intellectual property and
development, but the stories he tells, I think, address an even
larger question: how do you do worldchanging activism on emerging
issues?

Alex Steffen: So, what does "copyfight" mean, and what's WIPO?

Cory Doctorow: Copyfight is the broad banner to describe people who
are fighting for reforms to intellectual property -- trademarks,
patents, copyrights and what are called "related rights" (broadcast
rights and so on).

WIPO -- the World Intellectual Property Organization -- is the UN's
most captive agency. WIPO was originally a stand-alone organization,
essentially an industry consortium for rightsholders' interests, and
they got brought in under the umbrella of the UN thirty or so years
ago, with the understanding that they would change their practices to
make them consistent with other UN instruments like the Universal
Declaration on Human Rights -- humanitarian instruments -- and that
it would become a humanitarian agency for development.

Which makes sense. Information goods are a critical piece of the
development picture. Every successfully developed country made use of
free information goods. More accurately, they all went through a
stage when they were a pirate nation. America spent a century as a
pirate nation, ripping off the intellectual property of every country
around it, and in particular, of Britain, because when you're a net
importer of intellectual property, signing on to multilateral
copyright and patent agreements is signing on to exporting your
wealth off-shore. When you're a net exporter of intellectual
property, it makes economic sense.

The choice is not simply one of piracy or monopoly. There is a whole
rich middle ground of public domain and open information regimes
which could give developing world countries the tools they need to
serve humanitarian purposes, while protecting the legitimate
interests of authors, performers and inventors. WIPO could have
created a global knowledge goods regime which protected both the
commercial and the humanitarian fairly.

But WIPO completely failed to do that, and it went on being a
completely captive agency, simply making more copyright, more patent,
more related rights, more trademarks on the grounds that all of these
rights were themselves a good, regardless of the impact they had on
people -- whether they were denying access to patented
pharmaceuticals in poor countries that desperately needed them and
couldn't afford to buy them at the market price, or simply creating
copyright regimes that made basic education more difficult to provide
in developing nations. WIPO and the World Trade Organization's
intellectual property instruments together foisted a lot of policies
on the developing world that required them to adopt knowledge goods
laws that were incredibly dangerous to their body politic.

AS: Can you give us an example?

CD: If you're a net importer of copyrights, it is to your advantage
to have a robust public domain, for example, textbooks which are in
the public domain. It's to your advantage to have a wide scope of
things which are not copyrightable, like government speeches and
factual material. It's to your advantage to have databases, in
particular -- large collections of facts, which are not original --
be not own-able so that you can reproduce them, and interact with
them, and just use them when you need to. If someone has produced a
database of all the spectral colors and their values, or basic
existing engineering science, or so on, it's to your advantage to be
able to grab that and use it. Otherwise, you've got to pay monopoly
rents on the basic information you need to run your country.

WIPO and the WTO created instruments that required developing
countries to take things that had been in the public domain and put
them back in strong boxes. It created regimes that made it illegal,
just for instance, to reverse-engineer digital rights management
tools and create locally-interoperable products, so you had to import
foreign goods, which could only play foreign media, and your local
arts scene would find itself smothered, your culture would find
itself overwhelmed by imported culture, and your local technologists
would be undermined by foreign interests.

AS: So, the Nollywood scene, which we've written about -- the
explosion of the Nigerian film industry through the use of digital
video -- might be an example of something that would get whacked
under these rules.

CD: Totally. WIPO introduced something called the Broadcaster's
Treaty, which is the most egregious example of any of this stuff, and
essentially says, regardless of the copyright of a broadcast work,
the person who broadcasts it should have a 50 year monopoly over what
you do with the copies of that broadcast you receive. So, if it's GPL
or Creative Commons, doesn't matter. If the author of that work has
already blessed your use of it, doesn't matter. If it's in the public
domain, so the person who broadcast it doesn't even own it, it
doesn't matter.

So, imagine being a development-oriented broadcaster with a low-power
FM transmitter in, say, rural Costa Rica (where I used to live),
servicing Nicaraguan refugees by taking information that you receive
from distant stations with your big antenna -- public health
information, distance learning, government announcements -- and
splicing it together with locally-relevant public affairs programming
and retransmit it, that becomes unlawful under the Broadcast Treaty.

AS: Even if all the pieces of that content were originally Creative
Commons, or open source, or free use, or public domain, or whatever.

CD: Yep. If they were factual, if they were government transmissions,
whatever. Things that aren't subject to copyright.

Copyright traditionally rewards creativity. In this case, the people
who transmit this stuff don't create it. If they do, they have the
copyright, and they don't need some broadcaster's right. That right
is strictly for people whose contribution to the work is electro-
magnetic modulation. That's their creative act.

So, anyways, there was one NGO that'd being going to WIPO forever,
pretty much the only one: the Consumer Project on Technology, or
CPTech. It was started by this guy named Jamie Love, who is an
economist, and an ex-Nadarite, who originally got involved primarily
because of pharma issues, trying to get sick people access to
medicine in the developing world, but found himself ever more
embroiled in larger knowledge goods questions.

He was a voice in the wilderness. And he was desperate to find
another NGO (or two or five) who would come out and help. Because
it's really tough when you're the only one in the world saying, "This
is crazy. This is wrong. This flies in the face of reason." Everyone
thinks that you're a loon. But if fifty of you say it, it starts to
look more credible. So Jaime convinced EFF and Public Knowledge to
come to a meeting. Now there are thirty or so groups involved.

What that means is that citizens are starting to exert tons of
leverage on WIPO. Last September, a bunch of us gathered in Geneva
and wrote the Geneva Declaration, which was a declaration that
basically reminded WIPO that it had agreed, when it was brought in
under the umbrella of the UN, to support humanitarian objectives, and
that it had done nothing to date to do that and had treated IP as an
end in itself and not as a means to promulgate development and
creativity. We made a big stink.

At the same time, some of the very strong developing nations --
Brazil, India, Argentina -- developed a document called the
Development Agenda, which was an extension of this thinking, and they
brought it to the next week to the plenary of WIPO. This was in the
wake of Doha and Cancun, and developing nations were just really
starting to say, "We simply will not sit at the table, if what
happens at the table is we get fucked."

So WIPO was running scared, and they adopted the Development Agenda
unanimously. They said, we will, henceforth, make all of our
decisions on the basis of how those decisions will impact
humanitarian and development goals. That seemed like a huge victory.

So, we go to the next WIPO meeting, and -- well, you have to
understand how WIPO works. WIPO calls anyone who isn't a government
an NGO. So you have NGOs like the National Association of
Broadcasters, or various captive agencies from developing countries,
getting up and claiming to represent the people, but meanwhile, if
you're that Costa Rican community radio station we were talking
about, which operates on say, a total annual budget of $3,000, you
don't fly people to Geneva to speak on your behalf there.

So, we mount these arguments, and we have them on the ropes, and they
start to play dirty. We have these unprecedented heaps of literature.
We're cranking them out all night, getting them translated by
colleagues all over the world into French and Spanish and other
languages, and laying them out on the table the next morning. The
secretariat stops paying for the photocopying of NGOs' work, so we
have to go way into town to find a photocopy place. It's this amazing
flowering of information that challenges not just the misconceptions,
but the factual inaccuracies, the outright lies, of the other side,
and that information starts to disappear.

We'd put out 150 copies, they'd be gone ten minutes later. We were
like, look how popular we are! We never suspected it! Then someone
looked in the garbage cans by the toilets and found out that someone
had been stealing our documents by the hundreds and dumping them in
the toilets, hiding them in the potted plants, real dirty stuff. The
Secretariat said if you don't like it, maybe we just shouldn't let
people hand stuff out. There were security cameras over the
information tables but as far as I know, no one reviewed their
footage, which would have found the identity of the theif who was
trying to censor our literature.

AS: Somebody was clearly paying attention to you.

Yeah, because we're getting more vocal. So now when the copyfighters
go to WIPO we're demanding that they do things like establish a
permanent office that does academic study and research into which
development regimes do what where, set out best practices for
development-based IP, investigate alternative compensation schemes
for pharmaceuticals (like compulsory licenses for life-saving
medicines in the developing world).

The last one is a great example. The phramaceutical companies were
saying, "Well, that's very nice, that you think that we can recover
enough of our costs through some form of compulsory license to fund
the next round of drug development, but hands up everyone in the room
who's ever made a life-saving drug." And they'd put their hands up
and say "We say this won't work. These other people who've never made
a life-saving drug say it will. Who are you going to listen to?"

So we pulled together a bunch of smart people and said, Maybe you're
right, maybe we do need to fund research, maybe compulsories won't do
it. Why don't we have a treaty on this where we have competition on
research funding methodologies, where all signatories to the treaty
get compulsory license on all pharma, and in exchange, they have to
pledge a minimum fraction of their GDP, however they want to raise
it, and we'll structure that minimum fraction so it equals the total
global budget for pharma research. In the developed world, Big Pharma
can convince the legislatures there to fund research through strong
IP rights, and we'll AIDS cocktails which cost $100,000 a year in
America. But we'll do it through direct grants to universities, and
we'll get publicly-available malaria drugs--

AS: Drugs that actually keep people from dying from orphan diseases,
rather than treat people's minor anxieties or erectile dysfunction --

CD: Exactly. The kind of patents we accept directly leads to the kind
of pharma we get, And not just pharma. We need development-centric,
action-oriented programs across the board. We need programs that
support that Costa Rican radio station, that encourage the Nigerian
film industry.

The Brazilians and the Chileans and the Argentines have been showing
up and kicking a lot of ass, particularly on a treaty proposal that
the EFF and CPTech and a lot of other groups helped draft: the Access
to Knowledge, or A2K treaty, which starts from the premise that all
the copyright, patent and trademark treaty instruments to date have
got it all wrong -- they set out a mandatory minimum set of rights
that everyone who's a rightsholder gets, and an optional set of
rights that the public gets. As a result, you have global
harmonization of the restrictions to the public access to knowledge,
and you have no harmonization around the world on the rights that the
public gets.

This is a particular problem for democracy in the age of the
Internet. In the age of the Internet, entities around the world,
civic and nonprofit entities, who are by their nature cooperative
instead of competitive, and who therefore need harmonized frameworks
in which to work in -- because they need to know that what they're
doing in one country is legal in another country in which they're
trying to help -- have no way of knowing.

If you scan Orwell in Australia for inclusion in the Gutenberg
Project, and send it to London to be edited, you break the law,
because in Australia, Orwell's in the public domain, and in the UK,
he's not. If you turn a book into Braille in America and send it to
South Africa for access to the blind, you break the law, because in
America it's legal to make Braille editions without the author's
permission, but it's not in South Africa.

So what we're saying is that we need a set of harmonized limitations
and exceptions to copyright around the world -- for the assistance of
people who are helping the disabled, providing education, or engaged
in translation and archiving. Strict humanitarian objectives, you
know? We're still fighting this one out, but more and more, WIPO is
being forced to reject the American approach to IP in favor of a
comprehensive agenda for development.

AS: So it sounds like the copyfight is going well, at the WIPO level?

CD: We have kicked stupendous quantities of ass at WIPO. The reason
we've been able to do it is that they're flabby. They forces of
darkness have never encountered the forces of light there, so they've
gotten sloppy and openly dishonest. They're accustomed to strong
arming developing world countries. They're unused to the power of
citizen networks.

One of the truly subversive and amazing things the NGOs did is that
we set up open WiFi networks that weren't connected to the Internet
-- because there was no Internet access at the meetings when we
started -- and then we would take exhaustive collaborative notes on
what was said. It's very hard to take notes at these events.
Diplomatic speech is very stylized, so you'll have a typical
intervention which begins something like, "Mr. Chairman, allow me to
congratulate you as I take the floor for the first time, on your
reappointment to the chairmanship. I have every confidence that with
your steady hand at the tiller, you'll guide us to a swift and full
consensus on the issues at hand. The delegation from Lower Whatistan
is pleased to take the floor." Und zo weiter. Eventually you get to
the point, and after 20 minutes it boils down to, "No." Taking notes
on that kind of speech is really grueling, because it's very hard to
stay attentive and catch the one little phrase that has meaning.

So we'd have teams of three or four people using collaborative note-
taking software, and one would be taking notes, one would be adding
commentary and another would be following behind and correcting typos
and formatting and the like. Meanwhile, we're all of us checking each
other as we go -- filling in the blanks, noting discrepancies and so
on -- and then publishing it twice a day at lunch and dinner.

Now, the delegations there were accustomed to the old WIPO regime,
where the notes would be taken by the secretariat, sent out for
approval by the delegates, sanitized -- all the bodies would be
buried -- and then published six months later. And what happened once
we started working together like this is that delegates would get
calls on their lunch break about things they'd said that morning.
Suddenly, they're immediately accountable for their words, which
completely changed the character of the negotiations.

AS: So you knocked a big hole in the ceiling --

CD: And let some sunshine in. And once we had that level of
coordination in place, it let us do some other things better. The way
this works, see, is once the national delegations are done speaking,
the NGOs are given the floor, and the speaking order is pretty
arbitrary. The chair calls them in semi-random order, they speak, but
there is no chance to rebut. Since we were networked together,
though, when an industry lobbyist would stand up and say his piece,
and we knew he was wrong, we could give the next NGO person to speak
arguments to rebut with.

AS: So, basically, you guys are swarming at these meetings to counter
the power and money that these enormous industry associations have.

CD: That's completely right. So many of the arguments that knowledge
goods industries make for extending their reach are really naked self-
interest and rhetorical tricks. Any one NGO might not have the
expertise to counter them, but together, we're doing a better and
better job of exposing them. And once they've been exposed, the
arguments for extending the public domain are just obvious. So, we're
winning.

Now, of course, they're trying to forum switch. They're trying to use
standards bodies to mandate technologies and approaches. They're
trying to set up separate regional bodies, and get national laws
changed, and so on. What's happening is that the connection between
copyright, patent and related rights, and development, human rights
and humanitarian interests are being made by more and more disparate
groups of people. As these various NGOs come together, we're putting
them on the ropes, and they're fighting harder.

Gandhi said first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they
fight you, then you win. They're not laughing anymore. We're at the
fighting stage. But I think we can all see what's coming next.