As mentioned in James Love’s blog today entitled Notes from Day One of WIPO SCP 13, the WIPO Standing Committee on the Law of Patents (SCP) is examining four key issues at its Thirteenth Session this week including Standards and Patents, Exclusions from Patentable Subject Matter and Exceptions and Limitations to the Rights, The Client-Attorney Privilege and Dissemination of Patent Information.
The fact that the WIPO’s technical patent committee with norm-setting functions is providing a detailed treatment of limitations and exceptions augurs well for a positive agenda at WIPO.
Yesterday, Sri Lanka, on behalf of the Asian Group, requested the SCP to hold a discussion of the WIPO Conference on Intellectual Property and Global Challenges (13-14 July 14, 2009) so that Member States could provide inputs on the themes, structure and speakers for the Conference. For background, it should be noted that the conclusions of the previous session of the SCP, suggested that the Director General “consider including in the revised Program and Budget for 2009, provision for a Conference on issues relating to the implications, including public implications, of patents on certain areas of public policy, such as health, the environment, climate change or food security”.
Yesterday, the WIPO Director General Francis Gurry explained to the SCP why he added disability as a topic for consideration at the Global Conference. In his introductory remarks, Mr. Gurry noted that the goal of the Global Conference was to “strengthen WIPO’s role in the interface of intellectual property and other areas of public policy” where questions of “intellectual property have been made manifest” such as public health, climate change, food security and the environment. He acknowledged that in the past, WIPO was not active as it could have been on issues relating to public interest considerations. The Global Conference was intended to demonstrate that “WIPO was open for business” in the context of responding to global challenges.
Director General Gurry stated that he added disability as a theme to be discussed at the Global Conference. He noted the item had arisen in the context of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR). He noted that there were important technological dimensions to solutions to increase and enable access for the “blind and the visually impaired” to protected works. Gurry reiterated that enabling access for the “blind and visually impaired” to protected works contained an important development challenge as “95% of visually impaired persons live in the developing world”.
As the Global Conference (13-14 July 2009) follows upon the heels of the WIPO copyright committee (25-29 May 2009), we will know by then whether WIPO’s membership is courageous enough to consider the World Blind Union proposal for a WIPO Treaty for Reading Disabled Persons at the WIPO SCCR. This proposed Treaty, tabled by the WBU in November 2008, provides an expeditious solution to the problems faced by the blind, visually impaired and other reading disabled persons in accessing protected works. The litmus test of WIPO Member States’ commitment to truly integrate the development dimension into WIPO’s work program rests in its treatment of the proposed Treaty for Reading Disabled Persons.