"Many of the top experts on the subject of intellectual property and global development shared views in Geneva last week at a World Intellectual Property Organisation seminar. But while the event may have served to spell out the current debate on the issue, it is unclear how the two-day event advanced the issue from a policy-making standpoint. The meeting was not intended to be a negotiation and no conclusions were drawn from it.
WIPO’s international bureau organised the event under instructions from last fall’s WIPO General Assembly, the once-a-year gathering of all member nations’ top representatives to the Geneva-based body. After last week’s event, WIPO officials indicated that it is unclear what will follow the 2-3 May seminar as no further events are mandated.
From an educational standpoint, the well over a hundred participants were treated to the current perspectives on the benefits of intellectual property for development, as well as numerous proposals for improvement of the current intellectual property system and arguments for the status quo.
WIPO this year is considering a proposal to rework its orientation so as to place greater emphasis on developing country concerns, following the lead of other Geneva-based bodies such as the World Trade Organisation. The issue is expected to come up again at next fall’s WIPO General Assembly.
In last week’s seminar, non-governmental organisations, academics, industry representatives and others welcomed the chance to air their views in a WIPO setting, considered by some as a sign of increased transparency at WIPO. But disagreements sometimes arose.
One of the more prominent disagreements during the week was between Prabuddha Ganguli, an intellectual property management consultant and patent lawyer in India, and James Love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology. Ganguli welcomed the recent return of India’s patent system after decades, while Love attributed India’s success in intellectual property to the absence of patents and said it had chosen to resurrect the patent law under pressure from the United States.
In addition, Love asserted that Indian consumers have benefited from the lack of enforcement of copyright laws, a point Ganguli publicly denounced on at least two occasions over the next two days.
In his presentation, Love also argued that knowledge should be placed in the public domain when it promotes social welfare and protects human rights. He touted a bill introduced in the U.S. Congress this year aimed at reforming the intellectual property system to separate the need to sell products at high prices to recover research and development costs.
The seminar was co-organised by the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development, U.N. Industrial Development Organization, World Health Organisation and the World Trade Organization. It was broken out by themes including public health, biodiversity and traditional knowledge, copyright and related rights in the digital environment, competition policy, intellectual property and development, and national best practices.
Sisule Musungu, an intellectual property expert from the South Centre, an intergovernmental think tank of developing countries, opened the event with a look at the turn toward a development agenda in other Geneva bodies, such as the WTO’s acknowledgement of governments’ need to safeguard public health. He compared these to WIPO’s focus on intellectual property protection which he said might be anathema to developing countries’ best interests, as is suggested in the proposal for a Development Agenda currently under discussion at WIPO. [...]"
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Dipl.-Phys. Axel H Horns is Patentanwalt (German Patent Attorney),
European Patent Attorney as well as European Trade Mark Attorney. In particular, he is Member of:
IP Watch:
