The future of the WIPO Development Agenda enters a crucial phase this week as WIPO Member States meet at the fourth session of the Provisional Committee on Proposals Related to a WIPO Development Agenda (PCDA). The PCDA is considering 71 recommendations (”Annex B”) which inter alia call upon WIPO to hold discussions on complementary systems to intellectual property including, an elaboration of a treaty on access to knowledge, a Treaty on Medical R&D, and systems of free and open licenses and creative commons, and the promotion of models based on open collaborative projects to develop public goods, as exemplified by the Human Genome Project and Open Source Software.
Almost three years of intense negotiations at WIPO have engendered a growing realization among a diverse group of stakeholders in the Northa and South that WIPO cannot conduct business as usual; the development dimension needs to be integrated into WIPO’s mandate and program of work.
Annex B contains 71 proposals divided in to six clusters:
As noted in James Love’s Huffington Post analysis of the February 2007 session of the WIPO PCDA Embraces WIPO Reform on Intellectual Property Mission, the first phase of WIPO’s review of Annex A’s 40 proposals signaled widespread agreement on dozens of WIPO reforms and was “broader and more substantive than had been anticipated” notably positive commitments to
consider the preservation of the public domain within WIPO’s normative processes and deepen the analysis of the implication and benefits of a rich and accessible public domain.
and to
promote measures that will help countries deal with IP related anticompetitive practices.
In an effort to replicate his success steering the helm of the February PCDA, the Chair, Trevor Clarke (Ambassador of Barbados), is running the meeting along the same lines with much of the real work conducted in informals away from public scrutiny. In the informal meetings, regional group coordinators plus 2 countries from each region have been meeting informally to hammer out consensus on an outcome-i.e determining which recommendations make the final cut.
As mentioned in a previous commentary, a pre-meeting was held in Singapore from 30 May to 1 June of this year to pave the way for Member States to frame a common consensus. Among the texts discussed at the Singapore meeting was a non-paper tabled by the Friends of Development which distilled the 71 proposals of Annex B into 25 proposals which include substantive language calling on WIPO to consider the “possibility of a Treaty on Access to Knowledge and a Treaty on Medical R&D, free and open development and creative commons models.” The Friends paper along with the Group B (rich countries) proposal rumored to be 3 to 5 paragraphs long are under intense discussion at the informals.
On the first day, the morning session was devoted to Regional Coordinator statements, country statements and NGO interventions. Look out for the first day’s plenary session tomorrow. For now, here is the KEI intervention delivered to the 4th session of the WIPO PCDA.