EFF and other public interest groups are back at the United Nations this week, at the World Intellectual Property Organization's meeting of the "Provisional Committee on Proposals Related to a Development Agenda." This is the meeting where the nuts-and-bolts of how WIPO will turn itself into an actual humanitarian agency, instead of what it has done traditionally: help rich countries and their multinationals screw the developing world.
The public interest groups continue to subversively write down what's going on and publish it, something that WIPO's Secretariat once described as "abusing WIPO's hospitality" — normally, the Secretariat would release a report six months after the fact, once everyone quoted in it had the chance to revise the report of what they'd said. EFF and others publish their account of the WIPO deliberations daily — twice a day, when it's going hot and heavy — and it gets slashdotted, read by delegates' bosses in their capitols, and distributed. It has a genuinely disruptive effect on the orderly dividing-and-conquering of the world that's underway there.
Technologically, it's dead simple: the public interest groups make an ad-hoc WiFi network, open up the group-editing program SubEthaEdit, and collectively write down as much of what's being said as they can keep up with, along with explanatory text.
EFF's just posted its Day 2 notes from the meeting, and they're fascinating. Check out all these developing nations coming to accord on how to protect their interests, and then the US and its states like Mexico (which follows the US's lead all the time at WIPO) just poo-pooing the whole thing as too complicated to even consider. Shameless — and on display for everyone to see. Hilariously, the US continues to argue that the best way to protect developing countries is to put up a website explaining how great more copyright and patent laws are.
Chile had actually put forward three suggestions, but it was the proposal for WIPO to undertake a study of the value of "a rich and accessible public domain" that drew comments from a slew of Member States, the Committee Chair and public interest non-governmental organizations. And rightly so. As Chile's proposal notes, the public domain is essential for ensuring access to knowledge, and provides the foundation for technological innovation.
Intellectual property rights are supposed to promote the same goals, but you'd never know it from the comments of some participants who seemed to fundamentally misunderstand the essential relationship between IP and the public domain. Apparently under the mistaken impression that the public domain is the opposite of intellectual property, these participants claimed that the proposal was outside WIPO's mandate.
