[Ip-health] Financial Times: Clash likely on intellectual property rights

[thiru@cptech.org]

Clash likely on intellectual property rights

By Frances Williams in Geneva
Published: September 14 2004 03:00 | Last updated: September 14 2004 03:00

The stage is set for a clash over the future of international intellectual
property protection, with Brazil and Argentina planning to call for a
"development agenda" at the World Intellectual Property Organisation's
annual meeting later this month.


Intellectual property protection is a means of promoting innovation and
the transfer and dissemination of technology and "cannot be seen as an end
in itself", the proposal by the two countries says.

Among their more controversial suggestions are negotiation of a treaty to
promote developing-country access to knowledge and technology; work on
collaborative information-sharing mechanisms to stimulate innovation; and
an amendment to Wipo's constitution stressing the need to take the
development concerns into account.

Brazil has been in the vanguard of moves to ensure intellectual property
rights enshrined in international pacts do not override public interest or
development needs. This reflects its domestic agenda, which includes
promotion of generic drugs and open-source software.

Brazilian negotiators played a key role in drafting a landmark World Trade
Organisation agreement in 2001 that affirms developing countries' right to
give public health needs priority over drug patent protection.

More generally, Brazil has led resistance to US attempts to impose
ever-higher standards of protection on developing countries, notably
through bilateral trade agreements.

Supporters of a Wipo development agenda say the United Nations agency is
dominated by industrialised countries and multinational companies with a
vested interest in strengthening the existing property rights system to
the detriment of poor nations.

"It's about time we had a debate in Wipo", said one Latin American
official. "Developed countries are aggressively pushing their agenda.
Developing countries should be pushing theirs."

Wipo's critics discount claims that the organisation has become more
development-friendly. "Wipo is still pushing a strong rights paradigm,"
Jamie Love, director of the US-based Consumer Project on Technology, said
yesterday at a conference in Geneva on Wipo's future organised by the
Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue, a consumer lobby group.

Mr Love and Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford University law professor who
chairs a non-governmental organisation known as the Creative Commons, used
the conference to announce a new developing nations copyright licence that
will allow copyright holders to grant royalty-free use of their work in
poor countries.

Creative Commons has already introduced alternative copyright licences in
the US, Japan, Brazil and some European Union member states.

These can be used by musicians, writers, film makers and others to reserve
some, but not all, rights on their work, as conventional copyright does,
in order to disseminate it more widely. www.wipo.org
http://creativecommons.org