[Open-wipo] CSC Statement on WIPO Accreditation

[Thiru Balasubramaniam]

The following written statement was submitted today to the World
Intellectual Property Organization following today's decision of the
WIPO General Assembly to grant observer status to the Civil Society
Coalition (CSC), an international non-governmental organization
comprising 26 NGOs from twelve countries, North and South.


Thiru Balasubramaniam
Geneva Representative
CPTech


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Geneva

October 4, 2004

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This is our first opportunity to address the WIPO General Assembly.
The Civil Society Coalition (CSC) represents twenty-six non-government
organizations from twelve countries, North and South.  Our members are
concerned with a wide range of issues that are relevant to WIPO,
including access to medicine, access to knowledge, and better mechanisms
to support creativity activity.  Thank you for supporting our
application for permanent NGO accreditation.  We look forward to
contributing to the debate over the development agenda for WIPO, and in
particular, the proposed Treaty on Access to Knowledge and Technology.
We suggest this Treaty include provisions on topics such as the following:

1.    Implementation of Articles 4, 5, 6 and 7 of the Doha Declaration
on TRIPS and Public Health,
2.    Implementation of Articles 7,8 and 40 of the TRIPS regarding the
control of anticompetitive practices and the transfer of technology,
3.    Global access to publicly funded research,
4.    Mechanisms to promote openness, including support for new open
access scholarly publishing models, open standards for software and
Internet development, open databases, and other instruments of
disseminating and transferring knowledge and technology, and other
approaches that remove barriers to innovation, and support and empower
collaborative approaches to innovation and creativity,
5.    Minimum exceptions to patent and copyright laws which are needed
to protect the visually impaired, libraries, educators, consumers, and
Internet technologies, and which facilitate follow-on creative
activities and innovation by authors, performers, researchers and
inventors, working both as individuals and within creative communities,
6.    Provisions in the Patent Cooperation Treaty to protect standards
making organizations, and to better enable collaborative efforts to
create public goods, such as databases or standards that will be free of
patent claims.
7.    Mechanisms, such as those found in the Treaty of Europe, to
promote technology transfer and scientific collaboration between richer
and lesser developed member states,

We note also there are important topics such as the misappropriation of
social and public goods, both modern and traditional, concentrated
ownership and control of knowledge, technology and biological resources,
and unfair treatment of authors, inventors and other creative persons
and communities, and new trade frameworks to support research and
development that should be discussed.

Again, thank you very much for supporting the accreditation of the Civil
Society Coalition.