It's seems to be arguing:
(a) IP law is supposed to benefit private interests for the sole purpose of benefiting the public good.
(b) WIPO has become terribly one-sided, assuming without discussion or debate that what's good for the large media conglomerates who own copyrights is good for all copyright owners and the general public welfare.
(c) The United States and Europe keep beating up on developing nations to have stronger copyright laws and stronger enforcement, but only pay lip service (substantial, consistent, pervasive lip service, but still just lip service) to the principle that copyrights and other IP rights are supposed to serve people (and not the other way around) and that each developing country should be given some flexibility, such that if their average annual income is less than what a U.S. Consumer spends on entertainment in a year, they should, perhaps, not have to structure their own copyright laws based upon the economic models that work in the developed world.
(d) That a bunch of them have stepped forward and pledged to hang together, since up until now each has been hanging separately, and demand that balance be restored. And
(e) That, by the way (and you need to jump to the last section to see this one) there are huge antitrust and misuse issues abounding in the way a lot of major copyright and patent holding companies are exploiting their works, so perhaps it's high time the developing world also modernized its laws, under uniform WIPO auspices, to break up the oppressive activity that constitutes misuse of IP rights and impoverishes the masses in order to profit from the higher-paying elite.
Something like that. And though it is lengthy and somewhat repetitive, and stalks the points at length hoping they will become evident by the reasoning (rather than offend anyone by just making the points and then supporting them with reasoning), if you stay with it, I conclude that what it says makes a lot of sense. To say it another way, it is certainly bureaucratese, but certainly not gobbledygook. I found it to be a refreshing statement to the effect that this Emperor has long had no clothes, and it is high time WIPO did what the U.S. Supreme Court has done and declare that it is just as important to prevent copyrights from being extended beyond their bounds as it is to enforce them up to their limits (Fogerty v. Fantasy). (And for bureaucratese, there was some remarkable candor in condemning what is perceived as an incestuous relationship with only one side of the copyright balance, together with organizational management that relegates the delegates of developing nations to the waiting room while the developing nations hash out their differences in the back room and expect the others to go along. That part was bureaucratese in style, but not in substance.)
John
John T. Mitchell
http://interactionlaw.com
1-202-415-9213
On 4/8/05 6:20 PM, "Mike Bradley" <mbradley[_at_]techpubs.com> wrote:
> Huh?
>
> After stripping away the gobbledygook and bureaucrateze, exactly
> what's this about?
>
> = Mike Bradley
> www.techpubs.com
>
>
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Received on Mon Apr 11 2005 - 22:50:59 GMT
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