Discussions on the WIPO Development Agenda, an effort to make WIPO comply with its UN mission and focus on development, have dragged on for quite a while now without making much headway. No one doubts that this is due to opposition from developed countries, who are the ones profiting from the grossly imbalanced global system of intellectual monopoly powers.
Yet a confidential report that IP Watch is writing about shows that the obstructionism is more organised than what you might have expected. The report is from a meeting of developed countries that took place in September 2006, on the day before WIPO's General Assembly.
It's all there: Keeping appearances up, using supposedly neutral countries as a smokescreen, and throttling fundamental reform by pushing for the smallest possible outcome:
The chair highlighted the political side of the development agenda
talks. While the continuation of an open, rolling discussion would not
be acceptable, “there was also a view that we could not stop the
process of the PCDA [Provisional Committee on proposals related to a
Development Agenda] because it is politically important that Group B+
can certainly not be seen to be unfriendly.”
So the plan was to seek to define the mandate of the continued committee
with the inclusion of proposals made by the secretariat and by Kyrgyzstan
(which made a developed-country friendly proposal earlier this year that
has been kept alive), and push for feasible, short-term gains.
These developed countries will be seeking to break the ranks of developing nations by targeting those perceived as the weakest ones:
“[W]e will need to talk to the contacts we have in the Africa Group,
Asia Group - GRULAC [Group of Latin American and Caribbean countries]
is more difficult for most of us - to see where and when there are
opportunities to move that general debate into some short-term
practical solutions,” the chair summarised, according to the report.
Of course, it could be argued that this is just the way diplomacy works. True. Aint pretty, is all.
