The latest news from the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), is that Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Sierra Leone, Iran, Tanzania, South Africa and Venezuela are pushing forward with plans to establish a ‘development agenda’ for WIPO that could mean access to cheaper drugs, textbooks and technology for the developing world.

The critical question at this week’s annual WIPO meeting was whether the organisation would continue on its path towards extreme intellectual property protection, or whether WIPO can make a move to introduce some balance into the system for the benefit of development and public policy concerns.

Initially proposed by Argentina and Brazil, the ‘Geneva Declaration on the Future of the World Intellectual Property Organization’ lists a number of problems that a new direction for WIPO could address. These include the unequal access to essential medicines; the ‘morally repugnant’ inequality of access to education, knowledge and technology; anti-competitive practices and the concentrated control of knowledge, technology, biological resources, and culture; as well as the current, ‘unfair’ mechanisms to compensate and support creative individuals and communities.

Proponents of the new agenda say that global development objectives and public interest concerns of member states have been systematically ignored by WIPO. The organisation became part of the United Nations in 1974 under an agreement to take “appropriate action to promote creative intellectual activity,” and facilitate the transfer of technology to developing countries, “in order to accelerate economic, social and cultural development.”

But WIPO has become a mechanism for increasing extremism in intellectual property rights control and the source of global monopolies that are hampering access to technical and scientific innovation, say its critics.

Through WIPO’s current push towards greater enforcement of intellectual property rights, developing countries have been forced to enter into agreements that demand increasing enforcement budgets for protecting the intellectual property rights of foreign countries while they neglect more pressing domestic concerns.

According to James Love, Director of the Consumer Project on Technology, ‘The assumption seems to be that to promote intellectual property is automatically to promote innovation and, in that process, the more rights the better. But both assumptions are categorically false. Even where intellectual property rights are the best way to promote innovation, and there are many areas where they are not, it is only by having rules that set the correct balance between the public domain and the realm of private property that we will get the innovation we desire.’

Instead, the public domain has been systematically eliminated in what Love calls ‘the intellectual property rights arms-race’ towards greater private control.

‘Now we have database rights over facts, gene sequence, business method and software patents – digital fences that enclose the public domain together with the realm of private property.’

Proponents of the ‘development agenda’ suggest that the burgeoning free and open source software and Creative Commons movements have shown how innovation and creativity can be stimulated by a vastly different set of incentives to what was traditionally believed.

But WIPO refuses to accept these open models as legitimate. According to Love, there was ‘remarkable hostility shown by some national governments to a recent proposal that WIPO explore the potential of these open and collaborative efforts. The proposal was warmly received by WIPO staff. Yet it was squashed by pressure from companies pursuing a different business model, who were able to rely on the language of the “rights culture” to convince state decision makers that only ‘closed source’ models were legitimate.’

Critics of the current global regime say that WIPO’s role should not only be to protect intellectual property rights of others, but also to ensure that ‘fair use’ clauses critical to a successful intellectual property rights regime are being adhered to. ‘Developing countries often lack the technical and legal expertise to take full advantage of them’, says Love. WIPO should be assisting countries to implement balance, rather than pushing only for greater enforcement.

According to the declaration, ‘Humanity stands at a crossroads — a fork in our moral code and a test of our ability to adapt and grow. Will we evaluate, learn and profit from the best of these new ideas and opportunities, or will we respond to the most unimaginative pleas to suppress all of this in favor of intellectually weak, ideologically rigid, and sometimes brutally unfair and inefficient policies?’

For the hundreds of signatories of the declaration, it is hoped that this will be the turning point towards unlocking WIPO’s considerable power to help humanity.

For more information, or to sign the declaration, go here.