[Commons-Law] Materials from (and report on) the A2K3 Conference

[Pranesh Prakash]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Lea Shaver <lea.shaver at yale.edu>
Date: Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 00:59
Subject: [A2k] Materials from A2K3 Conference, September 8-10
To: a2k at lists.essential.org


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[ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]
The ISP's third annual Access to Knowledge conference (A2K3) has just
concluded in Geneva. Summaries of all the panels and materials
submitted by the participants are available at http://a2k3.org/.

Thanks to everyone who helped make the event such a success!

Best,
Lea

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Lea Bishop Shaver
A2K Program Director
Information Society Project
Yale Law School
203-432-7046 (office)
203-535-2560 (mobile)

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http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/index.php?p=1214&print=1

Intellectual Property Watch

9 September 2008
Access To Knowledge Conference Begins Addressing New Challenges With New Ideas

By Kaitlin Mara
A key conference on access to knowledge (A2K) opened Monday, with
veterans of the A2K movement mixed with many new faces and all
participants hoping to find new ideas over the next few days, as they
seek to clarify the best paths forward.

"The great insight of this movement," said Yale Law School Information
Society Project Director Jack Balkin during the welcome address, "was
bringing together a wide range of people who didn't even imagine that
they were working on similar goals, dispersed as they were in their
focus on health, science, movies, music, culture, telecommunications
policy, innovation, fair competition, freedom of the press and
transparency in governance."

The access to knowledge (A2K) movement, which emerged in the early
2000s, "helped us to see we were all after the same things," said
Balkin, but "precisely because of this success, [the movement] is at a
crossroads."

Maximiliano Santa Cruz of the Chilean mission in Geneva noted that the
intellectual property scene in Geneva four years ago was very
different. Changes since then include a public health amendment to the
World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects on
Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), agreement on a World
Intellectual Property Organization Development Agenda, and the recent
adoption of the World Health Organization Global Strategy on Public
Health, Innovation, and Intellectual Property, all of which he said
were informed by the A2K movement.

But how the initiative will remain relevant in the future is the
question begun to be answered yesterday. The third conference,
organised by the Yale Internet Society Project, Geneva think tank
IQsensato and others, is taking place in Geneva from 8 to 10
September. Yale hosted its first A2K conference in 2006.

New Voices; New Directions

Some highlights of discussion throughout the day included future
funding of A2K activities, the expansion of the A2K effort into new
agreements, rules and regulations (such as international standards),
concrete efforts to build capacity in developing countries, and new
ideas on how to exploit linkages between intellectual property rights
and international trade that had previously been thought barriers to
access to knowledge.

Financing will be a key upcoming issue, noted Michael Geist, a law
professor at the University of Ottawa. "These initiatives haven't
happened by accident," he said, noting that foundation funding had
played "a crucial role in allowing the voices to come together."
Teresa Hackett of Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL.net)
echoed this concern, saying civil society groups are less well-funded
than private interests and lobby groups, so creative solutions must be
found with funders to allow continuing participation.

Others mentioned new angles in the access movement might need to
examine as it makes its way into the future. Tim Hubbard, a leading
scientist with the Human Genome Project, noted that a rising question
for A2K advocates in the future was going to be balancing the drive
for access to information with the need for privacy. With human
genomes, even summaries of the data needed for statistical analysis
are detailed enough to identify the individual who donated genetic
material. It will be necessary either to accept that this kind of data
will be public, or to find a way for data to be filtered through a
trusted third party to prevent the misappropriation of private
information.

Margaret Chon of Seattle University Law School presented her recent
research on standard setting and certification as "increasingly the
way we regulate things globally." For every access issue, she noted,
there is a corresponding standard: for innovation systems, there are
open source standards; for climate change, clean development
mechanisms regulating emissions standards; for public health, food
safety standards.

These standards are often made and managed by non-governmental
organisations, notably the International Organization for
Standardization (ISO), but also several focussed non-profit bodies
managing, for instance, "fair trade" certifications. On the one hand
this management style allows space for grassroots leadership and new
entrepreneurs, Chon said, but on the other hand it is unclear who
holds standards bodies accountable, and the shear number of bodies and
standards can obfuscate what any one in particular means.

Gabrielle Marceau of the WTO secretariat noted that standards are a
good way to bring ideas from outside the WTO system into its law. If a
member state puts up a trade restriction, but does so in order to
comply with an international standard, it is considered to be
acceptable at the WTO, she explained. But Chon said it is important
that standards be used to encourage not just access to knowledge but
access to justice.

Also generating interest was a statement by Catherine Bennett of the
National Foreign Trade Council, the first member of a private sector
association to speak at an access to knowledge conference. Her
organisation's stakeholder support for intellectual property is borne
out of a desire for the kinds of infrastructure, transparency and
enforcement they need to feel comfortable with foreign direct
investment.

"The private sector is weary," she said, "of the confrontational
nature of intellectual property." She added that her organisation was
"interested in a dialogue" but that putting too many demands on the
private sector "will drive the golden goose away," reducing the
foreign direct investment (FDI) developing countries need. Several
audience members raised concerns that FDI has been shown not to
encourage technology transfer in the least developed countries.

Sisule Musungu of IQsensato noted that access to knowledge needed to
focus not only on intangible assets such as intellectual property
rights and technical barriers to trade, but also on physical goods.
"If we are just concerned about software," he said, "how do we ensure
that the one-laptop per child computers move to where they are
supposed to be?"

Richard Owens of WIPO said whether details of technical assistance
provided by the UN agency are made accessible is traditionally up to
the national government who requested it, but he expected this would
be reviewed by the incoming WIPO director general.

Marisella Ouma of the African Copyright and Access to Knowledge
Network presented an innovative project in Africa to deal with these
necessary capacity building issues. Her group is examining the way
that copyright law can be amended to facilitate access to educational
material, noting that "what happens in practice influences A2K" as
much as what's on the books, and further noting that while wireless
telephony has revolutionised the A2K movement it is important to
consider how many people actually have access. She noted that her lack
of broadband internet at home presents a real barrier to accessing
information online, due to long download times.

Other innovative ideas were presented by Thiru Balasubramaniam of
Knowledge Ecology International - who presented a KEI proposal for a
WTO agreement on the supply of knowledge as a public good, which would
use "voluntary but binding commitments to enhance the supply of a
heterogeneous" set of global public goods - and by Molly Beutz of New
York Law School and Christian Courtis of the International Commission
on Jurists, who discussed the application of the UN Universal
Declaration on Human Rights to access issues.

Andrew Rens of the Shuttleworth Foundation had reservations on this
use of human rights discourse, asking if it were simply a needless
rhetorical change, when the language of development, and in particular
economic development, is already strong enough to incentivise action
on A2K.

Over the next two days, attendees to the conference will be discussing
in detail different specific applications of access to knowledge to
varying areas of intellectual property, including possible alternative
models of business organisation.

The hundreds of participants from around the world include government
and intergovernmental officials, academics, lawyers, human rights and
health activists and a wide range of non-governmental organisations,
entrepreneurs and corporate representatives, think tanks, librarians,
and funders.

Kaitlin Mara may be reached at kmara at ip-watch.ch.