While I was having fun with pseudo-scientific language yesterday, Cisco Systems was busy spending a whopping $ 97.000.000 on wonderful marketing terminology like this: “Just as leading scientists worldwide have succeeded in cracking the human genome, so Sheer Networks has decoded the network genome to identify and abstract the four basic elements of the network Read more »
After digesting all the diplomatic slang at WIPO, a bit of nonsense really soothes the ear and eye. Today I stumbled upon an article on spiegel.de (in German) about three MIT students who have finally written the program every academic dreams about: An automatic research paper generator. SCIgen is extremely easy to use. It just Read more »
Those delegations exclusively dedicated to the well-being of their country’s rightsholder industries have made this IIM meeting end in extreme deadlock: The only report there will be is to be the delegation statements of the past three IIM meetings. The US delegation is hell-bent on destroying the Development Agenda before it is even conceived. Japan Read more »
This morning is set to continue with ten or so statements from NGOs. Yesterday, the NGO contributions carried few surprises, as by now everyone knows which ones are permanently suffering from high blood pressure, and which ones don’t. Who proved outstanding in this respect was the intervention from Eric Noehrenberg, the representative of the International Read more »
I missed an explosive afternoon. Thanks to Georg Greve, who took very thorough notes of the meetings, I’m nevertheless able to report to you. Man, whish I would’ve been there! Here goes. While I was guessing on a last-minute compromise, with the US giving in, it seems that their usual lobbying groups (such as the Read more »
After the meeting had started an hour later than usual, the NGOs that hadn’t been able to speak yesterday (as the Chairman cut off the round of NGO statements after an overly long and off-topic contribution from the International Chamber of Commerce) got their turn. There were not too many surprises, except for some sharp Read more »
It seems that the idea of more IIMs is through. Just a moment ago, the European Community finally came out with a somewhat clear statement. This calls for: more IIM meetings like this one until July 2006 financing this with funding set aside for the PCIPD the proposals to be split into two groups. The Read more »
The debate this morning was about points two and three of the list of proposals: The establishment of a standing committee on “Intellectual Property” and technology transfer; and a treaty on Access to Knowledge. These points being a bit more conflictive than the points discussed yesterday, this sparked an unusually vocal controversy between Brazil and Read more »
Today, the more conflictive issues might get to be discussed. A list of all items has unofficially become available (pages 1 and 2). (I’ve had a few qualms about posting these – so much for the spirit of transparency at WIPO.) Before the start of the regular session at 10 am, there are closed group Read more »
Discussion on proposals has begun “The idea [of a Development Agenda for WIPO] is horrible, but luckily it’s starting to fray”, said one of the German delegates to the IIM. Not only does this not exactly make me proud of my country’ s position on this; it is also simply wrong. As during the last Read more »