Last day of SCCR 24 regarding education and research exceptions (or topic 3 for the WIPO Secretariat)
There are many issues including: the structure of the proposed working document and its title, will it include comments or only textual proposals? is it a stand alone document? or is it linked to other proposals? and how it will be adressed/mentioned/continued in the forthcoming conclusions of the SCCR. All delegations seem to agree that the proposed document on education and research is not quite ready. More after informals.
In their own words:
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>> INDONESIA: …the comments should be separated and as a Friends of the Chair from the Asian Group in the meeting it is our understanding that it is the committee to decide whether or not comments should be put in the text and every Member State has the right to comment on the text….this document should not include the comments. It should be separated from the main bodies to give clarity of the document as well as to enable to accelerate and move forward with the working text.
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>> IRAN: T…– this morning in Asian Group meeting and there was support for our initial suggestion in plenary which at that time supported by several Member States as well we clearly said in the plenary we would like the textual comments to be separated from legal textual proposals. And it has been the case for VIP document. And this practice is fully compatible with the General Assembly mandate which calls for text-based work. …And so it’s regrettable that the text as it stands now is very confusing. And almost useless and does not take into account the utmost principle of this committee which is the equal treatment of the issues. If we committed to work on this area on the equal basis, we shall present the committee a meaningful document, a workable document. And this document we find that it’s not the one we want. And it’s confusing. And we request that again we discuss this matter in informal to find out a formulation acceptable for all. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
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>> INDIA: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Indian delegation is in full agreement with the statement made by the Distinguished Delegate of Iran on behalf of the Asian Group. As regards the working document on education and research exceptions, this suggested by Iran it should be like this: Legal textual comments to be the main part of the document. And the normal textual comments will be in the footnote and any general comments given should be at the end of the document. So it is in the spirit of the normal procedure to be followed. Otherwise it’s very difficult to understand the document which is a legal language which is the normal textual language and which is the normal general comments. If everything is mixed together at one topic so very difficult to go at it. Apart from this we would like to suggest we should follow the spirit of the decision made in 2011 SCCR — that’s the Twenty Third SCCR on libraries and archives. Similarly we sat here in the Twenty Third SCCR be and decided these 11 topics and then time was given to Member States to go back and then come and give any additional legal textual comments as such so the proposal from the Indian delegation is that so this document along with any further legal or textual or other comments or any corrections made to the comment already mentioned in the document and all of the three main topics mentioned maybe sent from the Member States to the WIPO Secretariat by September of 2012 so this could be incorporated and can be further — in the document and can be further discussed in the 25th SCCR to be held in the month of November. Thank you.
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>> UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: …we think the document has moved in the direction of something we all can work with. Nonetheless we’re attentive to the concerns raised by the Distinguished Delegate of Iran speaking on behalf of the Asia group and the Distinguished Delegate of India and so I guess for us we want to point out to everyone that we are moving in the right direction. We have a right spirit to make this document workable as a working document.
For our delegation and others, there are still some topics that are mentioned. And as they are mentioned that we came into the SCCR believing that this was not the range of things that were in educational teaching and research institutions and persons with other disabilities. But we believe that we’ll all find the right result on this. For us there are three components in figuring this out. One, the structure of the document. Two, the title of the document. And if you said to anyone outside of this committee the title of the document was critical they might laugh but we have all known how many hours we’ve spent over titles of documents. And three, how the document is addressed in the conclusion. And if everyone is flexible on those three areas, we believe we’ll get to an acceptable result for us. Thanks very much.
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>> EGYPT: …The African Group initially stated that as a principle we should be working towards separating the textual proposal from documents on this textual proposal…. we would like also to say that we found the RFF to an extent complex to deal with. First of all, I mean, the structure is not clear. You’ll find that there’s a start with some subtitles referring to generally applicable considerations. And then you’ll have underneath proposals represented. And then topics. And then followed by general comments. And then topics. So there is a separation even — I mean there’s a mixture or integration between the comments, general comments, and the topics and textual proposals. Complex to the extent that it’s difficult to deal with them.
Also, we note that while some paragraphs were titled proposals, they were in fact either expression of position, for instance a delegation is supporting something or explaining their national experience. For instance a delegation saying in my national law we have these provisions that say so on and so on. So these are not proposals. These are statements of national experience. So we think we should distinguish between those issues. As India stated we should start with the textual proposal itself and then if there’s any specific comments to it, they can be captured as part of footnotes. Or in a separate part appended to the document perhaps. And also we note the three issues by Indonesia and the United States the title, the structure and the conclusion and we also think they should title — the title needs to be addressed we just need to think about a more intelligent title to the document that captures exactly what this document is trying to achieve. And we think also we may need to have some sort of informal discussion as proposed by the delegation of Iran to try to figure out the best structure for the document. Thank you.
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EUROPEAN UNION: …
Provisional working document is an effort to try to get some structure that would help our discussions. But I agree with those that have made remarks as to the lack of clarity of parts of them. This has nothing to do, however, with the discussion as to what our textual suggestions are or not. We are here under mandate to discuss on the basis of text-based work. And we should not get into creating new categories of text-based work such as legal texts as proposals.
Our commitment and our mandate is text-based work and each Member State has its stage — each stage the prerogative to decide in which form to provide such text-based contributions to the work. I recall, as well, the point of the quality, which has been raised as well by the Iranian delegate and in that respect I should say that’s a part of equality in all Member States but this has been said from the delegate of Egypt it’s correct in my view that despite the efforts made during the Friends of the Chair work there is still some degree of clarity as to some of the topics, even for topics which are covered by Section 1 the one entitled users. If for instance I read on Page 17 of the document which is under the Section users and under the subsection outside classroom, I can see references to limitations such as recordings of works made by Broadcasting Organisations, reverse engineering or the compilation for the purposes of interoperability or transmissions in a network between third parties by an intermediary. I could continue if you read on Page 18 there are limitations and exceptions which we all know are very classical but are not necessarily related to educational research and there are similar concerns in other parts of the document. So in that respect we agree with those that think there is a need to do a further work on this document. I don’t know how you intend to do it. Clearly if we were to identify these subjects that we want to discuss in a similar manner to the way we did it in the document on libraries and archives it will greatly help our work going foortd am thank you.…
>> CHAIR: Thank you, colleagues for the comments on the document. It is appreciated that the document obviously needs a lot of work. It is a compilation of what the Secretariat received. There’s no question about that. I think the question that’s lingering in the room is what is textual suggestions…On this matter I note the discussion that’s — suggestion that’s been made by Iran and also India and African Group that we may have to have some informal discussion on this matter. There is in the work programme for today a slot to have an informal. And I wish that — I suggest that we take up this item during that time. In terms of timing, we will announce the specific time. So that is my suggestion. It is so agreed. So we will take up this matter on education informal that we’re going to have later in the day.