[WSIS CS-Plenary] Thinking about "intellectual property"is a mistake

[Richard Stallman]

    If you choose to use a different label for the family of
    law that includes "copyright," "patent," and "trademark"
    than the rest of the world, that's fine, but your arguments 
    below have no bearing on whether those topics should be 
    "in scope" for the WGIG or not. 

I think that whether the WGIG can reject bias in considering these
various issues makes a difference in whether it should address them.
Referring to them as "intellectual property" tends to frame the issue
with a particular bias.

This would not be significant if the WGIG were composed of superhuman
intelligences, impervious to influence through the way an issue is
framed.  But everyone in the group will be human, and humans generally
need determined effort to resist such influence.

Today I spoke at the Trans-Atlantic Consumer Dialog's conference on
the future of WIPO--an organization which has done much to promote the
term "intellectual property", and in whose actions this bias is plain
to see.  A previous speaker, a lawyer, came right out and said that
"intellectual property is a kind of property right, and property
rights are human rights, so you cannot question their legitimacy."

For the WGIG do a good job of considering these issues, it should
start by eliminating this persistent source of bias from its thinking.

However, it might be better in any case for the WGIG to reject the
issues of copyright and patents.  The reason is that this group will
tend to be industry-dominated (via the combination of direct industry
representatives and captive governments).  The business interests that
lobby for tighter copyright restrictions and for patenting of software
ideas might find the WGIG a tool they can use to push for these.

Practically speaking, the existing system of copyrights and patents is
imposed by treaties that will be outside WGIG's purview.  So WGIG will
not be able to recommend reducing them. only increasing them.  The
best it can hope to do, in these two areas, is not make things worse.
The most reliable and efficient way to avoid making them worse is to
exclude them at the start.

By contrast, the trademark issue is one that the WGIG must consider to
some extent, since it directly affects other WGIG issues.