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

[Vittorio Bertola]

Il mer, 2004-09-15 alle 17:42, Richard Stallman ha scritto:
> Since on the issues of patents and copyrights there is no opportunity
> for the WGIG to make things better, only worse, 

Are you sure? I mean, which other opportunities do we have?

As the recent actions by the European Parliament and institutions and by
the Italian Parliament show to me, acting at the national and regional
parliamentary level is very difficult; that's the kind of places where
IP lobbying is stronger.

On the other hand, if we succeed in creating a productive dialogue in a
small and balanced group of smart people, the strength of our arguments
might be sufficient to reach support at least in the governmental
participants, if not in the private sector representatives.

I personally took the floor in March in NY at the UN ICT Task Force
meeting, at one of the side sessions, and made a long intervention with
practical examples of how DRM systems and commercial oligopolies
actually limit your possibilities for self-enhancement and access to
culture and information. As a result, during the final plenary session,
the moderator of my session - a gentleman from ITU which I didn't know
before - got to the point of stating in front of 300 participants in the
UN ECOSOC chamber something on the line of "there possibly is the need
to revise the entire way we manage intellectual property rights".

I am not so naive to think that things can change so easily, but I think
that if you say the right words at the right moment, with a constructive
approach, you can actually create consensus around some simple first
steps, and start to reverse the current trend. And once you get some
principles recognized at the highest level, it might be easier to go to
your own government and parliamentarians and say "look, this has been
discussed at the UN, and these are the recommendations - why do you want
to do the exact opposite?".

But of course this requires care and strategy - if CS members of the
WGIG realize that the environment is not positive to our considerations,
they should then try to stop the discussion. But only then.
-- 
.oOo.oOo.oOo.oOo vb.
Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu.org
(((f1tt3r h4pp1er))) @ http://tmp.bertola.eu.org/