WIPO the captive
See here for an interview with Creative-Commons proponent Cory Doctorow:
WIPO — the World Intellectual Property Organization — is the UN’s most captive agency. WIPO was originally a stand-alone organization, essentially an industry consortium for rightsholders’ interests, and they got brought in under the umbrella of the UN thirty or so years ago, with the understanding that they would change their practices to make them consistent with other UN instruments like the Universal Declaration on Human Rights — humanitarian instruments — and that it would become a humanitarian agency for development.
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He goes on to tell of the petty politics involved in getting WIPO to honor its promise to formulate a Development Agenda:
So, we mount these arguments, and we have them on the ropes, and they start to play dirty. We have these unprecedented heaps of literature. We’re cranking them out all night, getting them translated by colleagues all over the world into French and Spanish and other languages, and laying them out on the table the next morning. The secretariat stops paying for the photocopying of NGOs’ work, so we have to go way into town to find a photocopy place. It’s this amazing flowering of information that challenges not just the misconceptions, but the factual inaccuracies, the outright lies, of the other side, and that information starts to disappear.
We’d put out 150 copies, they’d be gone ten minutes later. We were like, look how popular we are! We never suspected it! Then someone looked in the garbage cans by the toilets and found out that someone had been stealing our documents by the hundreds and dumping them in the toilets, hiding them in the potted plants, real dirty stuff. The Secretariat said if you don’t like it, maybe we just shouldn’t let people hand stuff out. There were security cameras over the information tables but as far as I know, no one reviewed their footage, which would have found the identity of the thief who was trying to censor our literature.
Sigh. The phrase “all politics is local” comes to mind, though not in the intended sense– rather, in the sense that global politics is subject to the same set of human dynamics that shape local politics, just writ a bit larger.
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Fortunately for the world, pettiness is not the only quality that scales up in such a fashion. Courage and persistence do as well– in spite of the above, the Development Agenda advocates “kicked stupendous quantities of ass at WIPO.”
One of the truly subversive and amazing things the NGOs did is that we set up open WiFi networks that weren’t connected to the Internet — because there was no Internet access at the meetings when we started — and then we would take exhaustive collaborative notes on what was said. It’s very hard to take notes at these events. Diplomatic speech is very stylized, so you’ll have a typical intervention which begins something like, “Mr. Chairman, allow me to congratulate you as I take the floor for the first time, on your reappointment to the chairmanship. I have every confidence that with your steady hand at the tiller, you’ll guide us to a swift and full consensus on the issues at hand. The delegation from Lower Whatistan is pleased to take the floor.” Und zo weiter. Eventually you get to the point, and after 20 minutes it boils down to, “No.” Taking notes on that kind of speech is really grueling, because it’s very hard to stay attentive and catch the one little phrase that has meaning.
So we’d have teams of three or four people using collaborative note-taking software, and one would be taking notes, one would be adding commentary and another would be following behind and correcting typos and formatting and the like. Meanwhile, we’re all of us checking each other as we go — filling in the blanks, noting discrepancies and so on — and then publishing it twice a day at lunch and dinner.
Now, the delegations there were accustomed to the old WIPO regime, where the notes would be taken by the secretariat, sent out for approval by the delegates, sanitized — all the bodies would be buried — and then published six months later. And what happened once we started working together like this is that delegates would get calls on their lunch break about things they’d said that morning. Suddenly, they’re immediately accountable for their words, which completely changed the character of the negotiations.
