Karsten on Free Software

Last week brought truly good news. After two years of negotiations, it looks like the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) may finally turn into an organisation that works for the interest of society at large, rather than just those of a small group of major holders of intellectual monopolies.

Last week’s meeting of the “Provisional Committee on a Development Agenda” (PCDA) resulted in a total of 45 recommendations (derived from 111 proposals).

WIPO’s General Assembly still has to approve the recommendations in September.

While this is not quite cherry pie and whipped cream for all, it’s a little step in a new direction. It gives me hope that there may be a day when WIPO no longer, as Cory Doctorow says,

has the same relation to bad copyright that Mordor has to evil.

A large coalition of civil society groups got together for this debate under the banner of Access to Knowledge (A2K). Thanks are due to all of them, here are links to just a few. FSFE was involved from the beginning, and I’m proud of having contributed something to this process. FSFE’s participation was only possible thanks to support from the community. It’s always difficult to find the money to attend WIPO meetings; Geneva is expensive. Thank you all!

Sangeeta Shashikant from the Third World Network has posted a first analysis of the outcome. Developing countries didn’t get all they hoped for, and had to abandon some of their core proposals. On the other hand, two years ago nobody thought that this was actually possible.

 IPWatch says:

Negotiators concluded a weeklong meeting with agreements on a wide range of proposals for new development-related activities – some hard to imagine for WIPO two years ago – and a recommendation to set up a new committee to implement the proposals.

“This is a major achievement,” said a participating official. “It’s a complete overhaul of the WIPO concept, broadening it to reflect society’s growing concern with ownership of technologies and knowledge, and its effects for the future, both in developed and developing countries.”

Recommendations cut across al areas of WIPO, from its work in “technical assistance” (advice to developing countries on building systems for the enforcement of intellectual monopolies) to WIPO’s own mandate and governance. The recommendations about the organisation’s mandate could prove crucial. The PCDA recommends that WIPO should coordinate its work more closely with other UN organisations, something that more conservative members were reluctant to do. After all, a discussion about copyright exceptions for educational materials might turn out slightly different when UNESCO is involved.

Another recommendation is ” To request WIPO, within its mandate, to expand the scope of its activities aimed at bridging the digital divide, in accordance with the outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), also taking into account the significance of the Digital Solidarity Fund (DSF).” This may help to introduce more progressive views on the digital world into WIPO, and would have been unthinkable two years ago

The recommendations still need to be adopted by WIPO’s General Assembly in September. I’m curious to see how this goes – the whole process was a heated battle, and progressive texts have a tendency of disappearing at WIPO. But if these recommendations are adopted, WIPO will be on a path that’s much more helpful not only for developing countries, but for everybody on this planet who isn’t a major record label, movie studio or pharmaceutical giant. The latter three may suffer if they cling to their outdated business models, but don’t worry about them just yet. They’ll retain more than enough political influence.

The United States, which had been the staunchest opponents of a Development Agenda for WIPO during the negotiation process, emphasised that the decisions taken were within WIPO’s mandate. In what looks like an attempt to establish a give-and-take, they also sought to link the results to renewed work on harmonising national patent laws across the globe. This has long been a pet goal of the US, but developing countries are sceptical, as they think they are unlikely to benefit.

Extensive reporting on last week’s negotiations and the Development Agenda in general can be found at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (in English), at FGV law school (in Brazilian Portuguese), and at Knowledge Ecology International (in English). They were some of the numerous civil society groups that put a huge amount of work into making this happen.