WIPO Decision to Advance a Development Agenda
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In the aftermath of the Geneva Declaration, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) General Assembly has decided to advance a “development agenda” that acknowledges the need for balance in worldwide policy on IP rights. As our colleagues at EFF have observed:
“In the past, WIPO has been roundly resistant to attempts to balance the interests of copyright holders, who make up the majority of WIPO participants, and the public, which had never been represented at the meetings. Previous efforts to get WIPO to hold one-day information sessions on alternatives to copyright — such as the public-domain human genome database, the GPL software license that underpins GNU/Linux, and the Creative Commons project’s millions of ‘some rights reserved’ books, movies, songs, and images — has been firmly rebuffed, with major WIPO nations applying enormous pressure to see to it that the issue was never brought to the table.
Now, in the wake of the ‘Geneva Declaration’ — a document calling on WIPO to work in the interest of all of its stakeholders, including the public — WIPO’s General Assembly has adopted a ‘development agenda,’ a kind of lens of public-interest considerations through which the treaty-body will view all future activities.”
A comprehensive collection of materials and proposals can be found here.
