[WSIS CS-Plenary] IPR : Strategic priorities for WGIG

[Federico Heinz]

On Thu, 2005-01-27 at 16:06 -0800, Robin Gross wrote:
> This is a great statement about ICANN's UDRP (and ICANN in general). And 
> it would be a real win, if we could persuade the WGIG report to say such 
> a thing.

I'm starting to think that the disagreement over whether WGIG should
address patents, copyrights and trademarks or not comes from a mismatch
of our understanding on what the WGIG's scope is.

I think that a statement along the lines of "whatever internet
governance is, its mechanisms should not attempt to either enforce nor
break any country's or treaty's laws, leaving those issues to the
elected legislatures and courts" would be useful and squarely within the
WGIG's scope. It ought also to be broad, and not relate just to
copyrights, or trademarks, but also to censorship, for example. I would
not call such an issue "intellectual property" nor "privacy" nor
"censorship", but rather "orthogonality with national legal frameworks".

Within that frame, if WGIG could pull it off to include a footnote
saying that the current copyright regime is a large obstacle to the
usefulness, ubiquity and progress of the net, while software patents are
a serious threat to further technological advance of a network that is
open to all, that would be just incredibly great. But I don't think
these are issues of *internet* governance, but of real-world governance.

> It is precisely because the various laws dealing with patents, 
> copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, etc. are causing so much harm to 
> the development of the Internet and people's ability to use the Internet 
> to improve their lives, that this discussion belongs directly in the 
> WGIG's cross hairs.

I think it does belong in the plenary's cross hairs for sure. But
"internet governance" is a very narrow subject, and we should aim to
keep it as narrow as possible. Otherwise we may wake up to a world in
which connecting to the internet requires compliance to a number of
software controls on what the user is trying to do.

	Fede
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