Proposal fudge at WIPO
Chile’s proposal was the topic of the morning, and will most likely be that of the afternoon. Country statements were usually not really substantial beyond offering their support for the statement – in most cases. No surprises here.
But a number of comments contained a mistake. The Chilean proposal stresses the importance of complementary licensing systems, such as Free Software and Creative Commons. Those responding to the statements sometimes seemed to think that such alternative licensing systems are somehow “out of” the “IP system”.
This is simply not the case. Both Creative Commons and Free Software licensing are based on copyright, not beside it or alternative to it. They are an integral part of the copyright system.
A similar point has been made – wronly – about the public domain, one of the core points of Chile’s proposal. Some delegations apparently were suffering from the perception that the public domain is somehow “outside” the copyright and patent system.
This claim, most glaringly coughed up here, is complete nonsense. My guess is that anti-reform parties are using it to claim that the protection of the public domain does not fall into WIPO’s mandate. (According to those people, nothing of interest to developing countries ever falls within WIPO’s mandate. Now that’s a consistent position.
The discussion is meandering quite a bit. This is due to suboptimal procedure. Instead of making a list of topics for discussion and then working on them one after the other, the Chairman (who is otherwise doing a good job – he’s the Paraguayan rep, the same as during the IIMs) is going through one proposal after another. As Chile’s is the first, we might well get stuck on it forever.
Correspondingly, some country delegates have more or less given up on this meeting already.They don’t think that much will come from it this time.
But maybe, just maybe someone or something might break out of the fudge.
Speaking of fudge, the EU also made a statement. It was reasonable, inclusive and totally blunt. But at least it was not utter nonsense, which is what some others tend to come up with.