I said I'd report from the WIPO interactive
meeting with NGOs, and this is it.
First of all, here's a news story from the meeting that tells you everything you don't need to know. It must have been written directly from a press release.
Second, I'm not going to go into a lot of the content. Frankly it was an off-the-record sort of meeting--no minutes were kept, and no record will be forthcoming. So I'm going to respect the intention toward the meeting. I made a point of not taking particularly detailed notes as well.
But here are some observations that I think are appropriate for public consumption.
All-in-all, I thought that it was a politically-useful thing for WIPO to have done, though I don't hold out much hope that it will result in better-informed and more temperate interventions from the more strident NGOs. But I have to say, personally I learned a lot more about how WIPO works and what specifically WIPO does, so it was worth the trip for me.
My suggestions for improvement were that the chair of any particular WIPO meeting should impose time limits on NGO interventions and insist that they be germane to the question at hand. Since WIPO is a member state organization, the chair is never really free to impose much discipline on member state interventions. But we as NGOs have no such rights, and so the chair ought to feel free to hold us up to stricter standards for our interventions.
Oh, and a number of WIPO personnel, including some very senior staff, volunteered that they regularly read IPBlog.
First of all, here's a news story from the meeting that tells you everything you don't need to know. It must have been written directly from a press release.
Second, I'm not going to go into a lot of the content. Frankly it was an off-the-record sort of meeting--no minutes were kept, and no record will be forthcoming. So I'm going to respect the intention toward the meeting. I made a point of not taking particularly detailed notes as well.
But here are some observations that I think are appropriate for public consumption.
- The meeting was an attempt by WIPO to inform NGOs of how WIPO works--what it does, what it does not do, what is within its mandate and what is outside its mandate, and some of the intricacies and pitfalls of working with diverse nations to help them implement the IP policies that those nations feel appropriate.
- WIPO felt this need because much of the withering criticism that WIPO has endured prior to and during the Development Agenda discussions has been (at best) ill-informed. NGOs have criticized WIPO for not doing things that WIPO cannot do, and for doing things that WIPO does not do. So the meeting was designed to inform NGOs about basic WIPO institutional practices, and (I think) to defend WIPO against some of those ill-informed criticisms.
- The meeting was also called because some NGOs have complained about not having enough input into WIPO deliberations. This meeting was for the purpose of hearing from NGOs specifically what they would like to be able to do.
- Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the NGOs that have been most strident critics of WIPO--who have made the most ill-informed complaints and who have most demanded more input into the process--didn't bother to attend the meeting. And the chairman of the meeting noted that most pointedly. Now, from my perspective, this is no surprise at all. These NGOs have no real intention of working with WIPO, no real desire to be informed. They simply use WIPO's liberal accreditation policy in order to gain a forum to vent their anti-Western, anti-capitalist and anti-corporate spleens. Then they put out a press release about what they did, and then they use THAT in order to raise more money from gullible and/or anti-corporate U.S. foundations like the MacArthur Foundation, the (Soros) Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, etc.
- There were no real interventions per se, although one or two NGO representatives took every opportunity to state their views anytime questions were invited.
- TRIPS seems to be a particular areas of sensitivity. Many of the IP skeptic NGOs are constantly bashing TRIPS at WIPO during their interventions. But as the chairman of the meeting pointed out the other day, WIPO was not a party to the TRIPS negotiations. WIPO is simply charged with providing technical assistance to signatory countries as they try to implement TRIPS in compliance with their particular deadlines. So WIPO seems sensitive to the idea stated by some NGOs that WIPO is "forcing TRIPS" on countries. WIPO is simply providing technical assistance on a treaty that falls within their expertise, but which they neither negotiated nor enforce.
- The chairman of the meeting held the door open for more such meetings to allow NGOs to ask questions and to express opinions. One NGO seemed particularly concerned that such meetings should be chaired by NGOs themselves, though I later expressed my opinion that I thought this was a terrible idea.There seemed to be some consensus that a meeting like this one about once a year might be useful.
All-in-all, I thought that it was a politically-useful thing for WIPO to have done, though I don't hold out much hope that it will result in better-informed and more temperate interventions from the more strident NGOs. But I have to say, personally I learned a lot more about how WIPO works and what specifically WIPO does, so it was worth the trip for me.
My suggestions for improvement were that the chair of any particular WIPO meeting should impose time limits on NGO interventions and insist that they be germane to the question at hand. Since WIPO is a member state organization, the chair is never really free to impose much discipline on member state interventions. But we as NGOs have no such rights, and so the chair ought to feel free to hold us up to stricter standards for our interventions.
Oh, and a number of WIPO personnel, including some very senior staff, volunteered that they regularly read IPBlog.