The World Intellectual Property Organization, a United Nations agency, has come under fire from a range of regional and global groups representing key public interest components of the copyright system for unfairly catering to rights holder interests in an ongoing series of regional meetings, resulting in sharply biased outcomes of the meetings.
The groups say they were excluded from participating on equal footing with other stakeholders, giving days of extra time to others to lobby officials from national and regional copyright offices. This provides support for the notion that WIPO and the copyright system are pursuing a mission to protect copyright holders, they argue, ignoring other creators, the public interest, and exceptions and limitations.
According to sources, representatives of libraries, educators and other public interest institutions arrived to a seminar on copyright exceptions only to find that they we were not included in a 2-day pre-meeting in which publishing industry representatives participated in great numbers. They discovered to their chagrin that the pre-meeting resulted in a “Nairobi Declaration” that focused exclusively on increasing rights and licensing options toward addressing what some refer to as a “book famine” in Africa.
WIPO has yet to make the declaration available, they said.
Tilting the Action Plans?
WIPO has held two of three invite-only seminars as part of member-approved “Action Plans on Limitations and Exceptions.” The plans approved by WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) members called for a series of regional seminars “based upon and built upon the prior work of the Committee and existing SCCR documents and are intended, without prejudging the final outcome, to provide the Committee with suggestions and possible areas for international cooperation to be discussed at SCCR/39.”
In the first regional seminar in Singapore, the meetings discussed the role of international treaty and other norm setting. According to members of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, three of four working groups of state delegates and observers in Singapore recommended “that an international legal instrument should be part of the package of work to be undertaken by WIPO.”
International publishing interests have long opposed any international rule making on limitations and exceptions. After the Singapore meeting, they expressed particular concern that the Nairobi Seminar on 12-13 June “will be a difficult meeting for publishers as the African Group at SCCR has been particularly vehement in its call for an international treaty.” But supporters of the exceptions agenda at WIPO found the Nairobi meeting was structured to tilt the outcomes very much in favour of publishing interests.
First was the pre-meeting with copyright heads. At the copyright office heads meeting, representation and participation of observers was demonstrably one-sided, the groups say. There were some 18 representatives of rightsholder organisations registered, compared to only one representative of institutions focused on users in the copyright system. And in the discussion panels, only rightsholder sectors participated, they said.
Meanwhile, the Nairobi declaration failed to mention “balance” even once, nor that exceptions are important to a copyright system. And it left out that most copyright royalties paid in Africa are received by rights holders in the North, not Africa.
The declaration also neglected to mention the role of libraries, archives, museums, educators and researchers play, they said.
In addition to being excluded from the copyright heads meeting with publishers, library, education and other advocates say they were censored at the limitations and exceptions seminar. When they and others raised points about the need for international instruments to meet the many cross border and other problems in exceptions, chairs instructed that this topic was out of bounds at the meeting, according to sources. The meeting thus concluded with no comment on the need for international norm setting on exceptions at WIPO.
A third meeting is scheduled for this week in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. The groups said the outcomes of all of the meetings could unfairly influence an important conference at WIPO on the eve of the WIPO copyright committee meeting in October. Some participants indicated privately the fear that WIPO is purposely driving a process to show lack of consensus on the limitation and exceptions agenda, giving an excuse to sideline it.
The groups charged that the actions may have run afoul of a mandate by the 2012 WIPO General Assembly (WO/GA/41/14) to allow member states to discuss an international legal instrument and to learn from regional beneficiaries.
WIPO had not been contacted for comment as of press time but it remains to be seen whether the WIPO secretariat will act to change the balance of the meetings.
