Today, January 10, 2013, USTR held a remarkably uninformative briefing on the negotiations for the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement for non-industry NGOs. Barbara Weisel (below center), the chief USTR negotiator for the TPP, led the briefing, accompanied by two persons from the public engagement offices.

On June 2, 2010, KEI submitted a FOIA request to the White House Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). The request covered:

KEI collection of various interviews, statements and news clips from the December 17-18, 2012 WIPO Extraordinary General Assembly that approved a June 2013 diplomatic conference to negotiate a treaty on copyright exceptions for persons with certain disabilities.

Video Interviews

Video interviews from the WIPO Extraordinary General Assembly, after reaching a landmark decision to:

Geneva, Tuesday, 18 December.2012

At the end of the two day WIPO Extraordinary General Assembly, Member States today agreed "to negotiate and adopt a treaty on limitations and exceptions for visually impaired persons/persons with print disabilities."

Here is a link to the WIPO press release: WIPO Advances Toward Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works by Persons with Print Disabilities, Morocco Offers to Host Diplomatic Conference Geneva, December 18, 2012,PR/2012/727

Here is the WBU press release:

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WORLD BLIND UNION (WBU) press release 18 December 2012

Press Release – WIPO Negotiations Treaty for Blind people

WIPO member states call for treaty for blind people to be finished in 2013

After a tense day of negotiation with all sorts of threats to block progress, it seems as though World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is poised to approve a diplomatic conference "to negotiate and adopt a treaty on limitations and exceptions for visually impaired persons/persons with print disabilities." The USA had come into the meeting trying to downgrade the agreement from a treaty to an agreement of ambiguous non-treaty status, and both the US and the EU wanted today's decision to be subject to a later approval -- dubbed either the kill switch or the safety

Venezuela delivered the following statement on 17 December 2012 at the WIPO Extraordinary General Assembly.

VENEZUELA: Thank you, Chairman.

Likewise, we, too, wish to extend thanks to the Director General and the Secretariat and the ambassador of Zambia for his successful leading work in the SCCR. We support the holding of a Diplomatic Conference on this subject. It will be a very significant political signal if we were to convene this conference which has very major human rights over tones.

This was the statement delivered today (17 December 2012) by Egypt on behalf of the African Group at the Forty-Second (22nd Extraordinary) Session of the WIPO General Assembly.

African Group. The African Group would like to welcome the significant progress achieved on advancing the draft text of WIPO Treaty on limitations and exceptions for visually impaired persons, person with print disabilities, which was adopted in November 2012 by the Standing Committee to Copyright and Related Rights, in its 25th session.

Morocco delivered this statement today (17 December 2012) announcing its formal candidacy to host a Diplomatic Conference in June 2013.

Right before noon at the December 17, 2012 Extraordinary General Assembly, the US read the statement below. Here are a couple of quick comments.

1. The US Statement supports a diplomatic conference, but aligns itself with the EU, calling for a later "final review" of "many outstanding issues," so only a tentative decision would be made now, and if the EU or USA is not satisfied with concessions from developing countries, they want to be able to revoke the approval for the meeting.

This was the statement delivered by Benin on behalf of least-developed countries at the Forty-Second (22nd Extraordinary) Session of the WIPO General Assembly on 17 December 2012.

BENIN: Thank, Chairman. I do thank you for giving me the floor. I would like to begin here by apologizing on behalf of my ambassador. He would have loved to be with us this morning, but unfortunately he had other commitments and he was unable to attend this meeting.

The following intervention was delivered by Brazil on behalf of the Development Agenda Group at the Forty-Second (22nd Extraordinary) Session of the WIPO General Assembly on 17 December 2012.

Yesterday I received a Samsung laptop computer running Google's Chrome OS. This is the new $249 Chromebook with an SSD drive, 2 gigs of RAM, an 11.6 inch 1366 x 768 pixels screen, and the 1.7 GHz Exynos 5200 processor. The laptop weights 2.4 pounds and has a nice usable keyboard and a well implemented trackpad. There is also the option of a model with 2 years of 3G (limited) data from Verizon, for just $329.

On 3 December 2012, the 15th round of negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) began in Auckland, Newe Zealand and included, for the first time, eleven negotiating parties with the additions of Canada and Mexico more than a year after these two countries formally asked to join the negotiations. The current negotiating parties now include Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam. Rumored interested countries include Japan, Thailand and South Korea.