The Access to Knowledge treaty is an effort to get the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to start acting like a humanitarian UN agency, instead of an industry consortium solely concerned with extending copyright, patents and trademark. The treaty calls on WIPO to harmonize international law to ease the tasks of educators, archivists and those who provide access to disabled people — today, the laws for these tasks vary from nation to nation, making international cooperation legally difficult if not impossible.
An open group of international non-governmental organizations, governments, scholars, acticists and individuals has been planning the treaty for some months now and we've finally got a web-site where all of our work is being documented and published, with calls to action and other ways to get involved. Anyone can register and add material to the site.
In an October 15 speech, the Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Jonathan Dudas, vowed that the U.S. government will "fight" proposals that aim to "fundamentally change the WIPO charter and philosophy" away from its current focus on the promotion of intellectual property.
In his keynote remarks at the Annual Meeting of the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA–a 15,000-member U.S. bar association comprised primarily of intellectual property lawyers) Dudas stated emphatically that "our current system and international norms are properly balanced". In a not-so-oblique reference to recent discussions at WIPO of a 'Development Agenda,' Dudas derided efforts to encourage WIPO to take a more balanced approach to intellectual property as part of a "strategy to water down intellectual property protection" that is "even worse" than efforts to increase PCT application fees.
(Thanks, Thiru!)
