WIPO Announces Plans to Support Public Domain, Open Source

The United Nation's (UN's) World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has adopted a "development agenda" that acknowledges the need for balance in worldwide policy on trademark, copyright, and patents. In the past, WIPO has been roundly resistant to attempts to balance the interests of copyright holders, who make up the majority of WIPO participants, and the public, which had never been represented at the meetings. Previous efforts to get WIPO to hold one-day information sessions on alternatives to copyright -- such as the public-domain human genome database, the GPL software license that underpins GNU/Linux, and the Creative Commons project's millions of "some rights reserved" books, movies, songs, and images -- has been firmly rebuffed, with major WIPO nations applying enormous pressure to see to it that the issue was never brought to the table.

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