The “commercial availability” issue looked like a mess this evening, as delegates emerged from closed* negotiations to provide two pages of proposals for text for Article D(3), which was intended to be a single sentence. I am attaching the text here. Hard to say how this will end up. Now there is some bracketed text that “reasonable terms” will include “interoperability, time and other terms” which I assume also includes prices. It is nice to see interoperability appearing in the text, although countries like the USA that should support it because it is consistent with their own legal traditions (See Marrakesh Note 4), have not yet done so. But in general, what you have a lot of text and no obvious way to close this out. This evening they have moved on to another tough topic, the issue of technical protection measures.
On the issue of interoperability of accessible texts, I suggest people take a few minutes to watch this very powerful opening statement for the Civil Society Coalition (CSC) by Marcus Low from South Africa. http://youtu.be/Aoo7A43RitY
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* Compared to other trade negotiations, the WIPO process is remarkably open, particularly if you are here at the venue. You can not only attend all the open sessions, and speak sometimes, but you can listen to an audio feed, and see some text, of the “closed” negotiations, in real time, so long as you don’t use social media or talk to reporters, under a gap order that we are trying to change, into a Chatham House rule. But still, the closed sessions report back to the “public” sessions regularly, and today we have two drafts of the Article D (3) text, for example.