Last fall, we kicked ass at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a UN agency that is supposed to be a humanitarian body but really spends all of its time ratcheting up the exclusive rights of big patent, copyright and trademark holders. We went to WIPO and drafted the "Geneva Declaration," laying out the case for a WIPO that lived up to its humanitarian mission by promoting international development and creativity. The Declaration begat the Development Agenda proposal, which the delegations of India, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and others took to the main session of WIPO, calling on it to reform itself. WIPO passed the Development Agenda, and now we're holding them to their promise.
Last winter, a group of activists, scholars, reps of commercial and standards bodies and practicioners of development gathered in Geneva to begin drafting a new treaty on Access to Knowledge (A2K), inviting all who couldn't be there in person to follow along on a public mailing list. Those two days were among the most exhilarating in my life: we began the process of drafting a treaty that will guarantee rights of archivists, educators and those who provide access to disabled people.
A2K is bearing fruit: the first draft of the treaty has just been published preparatory to a drafting summit in London this Thursday and Friday. I'm reading through it now and boy it's good stuff — just check out some of the provisions on DRM:
legal prohibitions against anti-circumvention of DRM/TPM measures
shall be limited, and not be enforced in the following cases:i. When DRM/TPM licensing terms preclude implementation in Free and Open
Source Software (FOSS),ii. When DRM/TPM systems are marketed without adequate disclosure of their
restriction modes and the terms under which they can be invoked, or when
terms can be modified without a user's explicit consent,iii. When DRM/TPM systems do not provide mechanisms to permit works to be
accessible by persons with visually impairments or other disabilities,iv. When DRM systems rely upon social entities that such as households and
families in their technology more narrowly or restrictively than have been
defined in local law,
