WIPO's Development Agenda

The WIPOⁱ Development Agenda

WIPO was created in 1970 to take over the role of its predecessor, the Berne-based United International Bureau for the Protection of Intellectual Property or BIRPI. French for Bureaux Internationaux Reunis pour la Protection de la Propriete Intellectualle, the BIRPI was set up in 1983 to administer the Berne Conventionⁱ for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and the Paris Conventionⁱ for the Protection of Industrial Property.

It was the signing of the Convention Establishing the World Intellectual Property Organisation in Stockholm on July 14, 1967 that led to the birth of WIPO three years later. In 1974, WIPO became a specialised agency of the United Nations, with a mandate to “administer intellectual property matters recognised by the member States of the UN."

Article 4 of the WIPO Convention describes WIPO’s role - to “promote the development of measures designed to facilitate the efficient protection of intellectual property throughout the world and to harmonise national legislation in this field.” The Article also mentions that WIPO is to “encourage the conclusion of international agreements designed to promote the protection of intellectual property.”

Headquartered in Geneva, WIPO enjoys a source of income unlike that of other branches of the UN. Instead of being dependent on the contributions of member states, over 90 per cent of its income comes from the collection of fees by the International Bureau under the intellectual property application and registration systems, which it administers. This includes the Patent Co-operation Treaty, the Madrid system for trademarks and The Hague system for industrial designs.

The agency currently has 183 member states and administers 23 international treaties dealing with various aspects of intellectual property. However it is not an elected body and as such there are doubts by some parties as to whether WIPO is able to act in the interests of the citizens of its member states.

WIPO Committees

WIPO gets most of its work done through specific committees. Some of these committees include the Standing Committee on Patents (SCP), the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCRⁱ), the Advisory Committee on Enforcement (ACE), the Intergovernmental Committee (IGC) on Access to Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore, and the Working Group of the Reform of the Patent Co-operation Treaty (PCT).

Resistance to IP expansion and “forum shifting”

WIPO has been making decisions by consensus. Each member state has only one vote regardless of population or contribution to funding. This resulted in developing countries being able to block plans by their developed counterparts to expand intellectual property treaties through WIPO. This resistance was evident in the 1960’s and 1970’s when developing countries blocked expansion plans such as universal pharmaceutical patents.

To get around this stand off, developed countries led by the United States in the 1980’s moved the discussion on intellectual property standard-setting out of WIPO and into a forum where the developed countries are better able to get their way – the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). GATT eventually evolved into the World Trade Organisation and the American “forum shifting” strategy led to the enactment of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPSⁱ).

Item 12 – The Development Agenda

On October 4 2004, the WIPO General Assembly agreed to adopt a proposal offered by Argentina and Brazil on the “Establishment of a Development Agenda for WIPO”. This proposal came out of the Geneva Declaration on the Future of the World Intellectual Property Organisation and was co-sponsored by Bolivia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Iran, Kenya, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania and Venezuela.

Together with Argentina and Brazil, these countries argued that the various degrees of intellectual property rights protection should reflect the level of development of any given country. The proposal, often referred to as “Item 12” due to its place on the meeting agenda list, was also supported by India albeit in a separate but similar statement.

“The term ‘development’ as used by these (developed) countries, including in WIPO, means quite the opposite of what developing countries understand when they refer to the ‘development dimension’,” said India’s representative to WIPO, Debabrata Saha with regards the Development Agenda proposal.

Saha added: “If you share the perspective of the developed countries, 'development' means increasing a developing country's capacity to provide protection to the overwhelmingly developed country owners of IP rights!”

The Geneva Declaration and the future of WIPO

Prior to this General Assembly, a meeting was held where NGOs, scientists, academics and other concerned individuals, including Consumers International, signed the Geneva Declaration on the Future of the World Intellectual Property Organization, the document in which Argentina and Brazil’s development agenda was based on. The Declaration calls on WIPO to pay more attention to the needs of developing countries and to approach intellectual property as a means for development rather than being an end in itself.

The Declaration points out that being partial to the owners of intellectual property has many dire effects on consumers in developing countries:

• Without access to essential medicines, millions suffer and die;
• Morally repugnant inequality of access to education, knowledge and technology undermines development and social cohesion;
• Anticompetitive practices in the knowledge economy impose enormous costs on consumers and retard innovation;
• Authors, artists and inventors face mounting barriers to follow-on innovation;
• Concentrated ownership and control of knowledge, technology, biological resources and culture harm development, diversity and democratic institutions;
• Technological measures designed to enforce intellectual property rights in digital environments threaten core exceptions in copyrightⁱ laws for disabled persons, libraries, educators, authors and consumers, and undermine privacy and freedom;
• Key mechanisms to compensate and support creative individuals and communities are unfair to both creative persons and consumers;
• Private interests misappropriate social and public goods, and lock up the public domainⁱ.

Giving support to the proposal of Argentina and Brazil, the Geneva Declaration calls for WIPO to take on a more balanced view of the benefits of harmonization and diversity. Global conformity of intellectual property rules may only be pursued if it is certain that it will benefit everyone. Without this certainty the Declaration says “A ‘one size fits all’ approach that embraces the highest levels of intellectual property protection for everyone leads to unjust and burdensome outcomes for countries that are struggling to meet the most basic needs of their citizens.”

Consequent to the efforts of civil society in the Geneva Declaration, a number of organisations led by CIⁱ member Consumer Project on Technology (CPTech) have embarked on an Access to Knowledge (A2Kⁱ) Treaty in the hope that the A2K Treaty will eventually be introduced and adopted as part of WIPO’s Development Agenda.

Source:

Wikipedia – World Intellectual Property Organisation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIPO,

TWN – WIPO has failed in its development mission http://www.twnside.org.sg/title2/twr171h.htm,

Asia Times Online - Putting the breaks on intellectual property rights by Chee Yoke Heong http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/FJ15Dj01.html,

Consumer Project on Technology – The Geneva Declaration http://www.cptech.org/ip/wipo/genevadeclaration.html