Next week, non-governmental organizations, rightsholder reps, and national delegates from all over the world will converge on Geneva to meet at the World Intellectual Property Organization, for a landmark meeting on promoting development through copyright, trademark and patents.
This comes out of last fall's "Development Agenda," where India, Brazil, Argentina and other developing countries held WIPO's feet to the fire and demanded that it adopt a formal policy to act like any other UN agency: that is, to promote humanitarian goals, not higher levels of copyright restrictions.
In the interim, it's been clear that WIPO and the rich countries it has traditionally served aren't exactly thrilled about this — for one thing, they stabbed the public interest groups in the back and arranged to lock nearly all of them out of the room.
With the meeting about to start, the national delegations have started to produce documents describing their proposals. Mexico — captive state that it is — has produced an embarrassment of a document calling for more copyright to save development. The US has produced an even dumber document saying that the solution to development is to assign developing nations "buddies" from the developed world to show them the ropes. The UK's document says that they think this stuff is important but aren't willing to do anything about it.
Shining out like a single rose on top of a mountain of crap is a 12,000-word detailed analysis by fourteen nations ("the friends of development"), explain exactly what they mean when they talk about facilitating development.
Jamie Love's done a great analysis of the proposals, with a scorecard on which buzzwords the different papers use, and how often they use them:
USA
All words 3059
Abuse 0
Access 3
Access to knowledge: 0
Anticompetitive 0
Consumer 0
Doha Declaration on the TRIPS 0
Education 6
Exceptions 0
Human Rights 0
Limitations 0
Market failure 0
Monopoly 0
Open source: 0
Poverty: 0
Public Health 0
