Is the cold war really over?
With the free world busy fighting the communists, it seems that the Cold War has survived its end in the real world by a decade and a half. If you ask the part of lobbying organisms that call themselves free-marketeers, the present tensions in WIPO are really a fight between “pro-IP” freedom fighters and “anti-IP”, well, communists.
This is the the result I was able to condense from conversations with several people over a few glasses of wine. The traditionalists, mainly integrated into the US neo-conservative movement, categorize everyone as either “pro-IP” or “anti-IP”. This is counterproductive to any sort of dialogue.
Moreover, it once again shows that the term “Intellectual Property” has so much potential for confusion that it reduces otherwise surely intelligent women and men to sectarian populists. Maybe a division along the lines of the aspects contained in it – patents, copyright, trademarks and so on – would be helpful. But then, dealing with three issues instead of one might be too complex for certain binary minds.