[Ecommerce] WIPO Provisional Committee on Devlt Agenda, Day 2 Notes

[Gwen Hinze]

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[ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]
The NGO coalition notes of PCDA Day 2 are now posted at:

<http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004434.php>

Here's my take:

Blogging WIPO: Understanding the Public Domain

February 22, 2006

In the afternoon of Day 2 of the WIPO Provisional Committee on
Proposals Related to a Development Agenda we finally got down to
business: discussing Chile's thoughtful proposal on the Public
Domain. Chile had actually put forward three suggestions, but it was
the proposal for WIPO to undertake a study of the value of "a rich
and accessible public domain" that drew comments from a slew of
Member States, the Committee Chair and public interest
non-governmental organizations. And rightly so. As Chile's proposal
notes, the public domain is essential for ensuring access to
knowledge, and provides the foundation for technological innovation.

Intellectual property rights are supposed to promote the same goals,
but you'd never know it from the comments of some participants who
seemed to fundamentally misunderstand the essential relationship
between IP and the public domain. Apparently under the mistaken
impression that the public domain is the opposite of intellectual
property, these participants claimed that the proposal was outside
WIPO's mandate.

The copyright and patent regimes have historically recognized that
the creation of intellectual property requires a robust public
domain. Material from the public domain forms the building blocks on
which new creations are built. As the Chilean delegate eloquently put
it: "Our starting premise is that nothing is created out of nothing.
The greater the works in the public domain, the greater the
creation." The public policy underlying the grant of time-limited
exclusive copyright and patent rights is that the public domain will
be continually enriched, to the benefit of all society.

Precisely because of the public domain's importance, recent
encroachments upon it - such as Technological Protection Measures,
new sui generis database rights for non-copyrightable data, exclusive
rights for test data in the patent arena, and extensions of copyright
and patent terms - deserve careful scrutiny.

Chile also proposed that WIPO analyze complementary systems to
intellectual property that incentivize creative activity, innovation
and technology transfer, including free and open source software and
creative commons licences, and a study or set of case studies
assessing the appropriate level of intellectual property protection
based on different countries' development status.

The NGO coalition's notes of day two's proceedings are after the
jump. There are also great summaries of the debate at the blogs of
IP-Watch, Georg Greve, and Karsten Gerloff of Free Software
Foundation Europe, FGV Brazil, and  Thiru Balasubramaniam of Consumer
Project on Technology.

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Gwen Hinze
International Affairs Director
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Email: gwen@eff.org
Tel.: +1 415 436 9333 x110