The steering committee of the Global Congress and IP and the Public Interest has unanimously approved the application of Karisma Foundation to hold the next Congress in Cartagena, Colombia, in (likely August) 2020. (By longstanding practice, the steering committee is composed of all past hosts of the Congress, as permanent members, and the track leaders of the last Congress, who serve on the committee for one year).
The committee also favorably received strong applications from South Korea and Tanzania. We voted to move forward with discussions with the Korea sponsors with the aim of exploring hosting the next Congress in Korea.
We are particularly pleased to be working with a new chair, Carolina Botero, who has been contributing to the Congress since its start. And we are pleased to be working with one of the region’s leading women-run information policy NGOs– Karisma Foundation. Holding the Congress in a new country with a new host organizations offers an unparalleled opportunity to grow the Congress and its leadership further.
The steering committee will be working with Karisma in the coming months to complete the fundraising and launch the applications to contribute to the Congress. Please do begin the thought process for what you might want to achieve at the next Congress. Applications will likely be opened around October 2019.
This Congress will expand our reach from “intellectual property” into “information policy” – raising the profile of long standing discussions at the Congress of issues like content moderation, digital trade, and Internet freedom that are not strictly intellectual property issues.
Some of the ideas noted in the Karisma application include:
On Copyright
One specific policy aspect that will need attention is that, after the approval of the EU directive on Copyright the different stakeholders in the region are willing to bring similar policies forward. We are seeing this from the media sector and also from local Copyright authorities.
On Medicines
A collective of 30 organizations from the region has been promoting since 2016 the implementation of a series of measures to address the harm that intellectual property model causes to access to medicines. They have presented their proposals before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the United Nations Secretary General’s High Level Panel on Access to Medicines. A Congress hosted in Latin America will provide the opportunity for the collective to broadly present its proposals, to be expanded by the support of academics and activists from other regions and to be enriched by different visions and strategies.
On Open Policies
After more than 15 years of open movements, open policies are starting to flourish in the region. The Congress will offer a unique venue to share lessons and inspire new road maps.
On Internet Regulation
Countries in the region have had similar problems and approaches when it comes to Internet regulation, due to being at the same time important markets, but not the main producers of digital technologies, and due to specificities relating to inequalities, culture and language, fragility of democracies and authoritarianism, etc. We have experienced policies which express technologic solutionism with troublesome outcomes, little participation and few concerns regarding evidence, impact assessments, or timely decisions. At the same time, we have important articulations of “digital rights” organizations and academics in the region, such as RedLatAm, Al Sur etc. – far beyond the articulation of organizations working specifically on copyright for instance. Therefore, when it comes to internet regulation, holding the Congress in Colombia is an] opportunity to bring such articulations to the table.
