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Archived updates for Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Watchout WIPO, Here Comes WIWO

The budding World Intellectual Wealth Organization (d/b/a Free Software Foundation Europe) is "convinced that new answers sometimes require new questions, not more careful repetition of old questions. A World Intellectual Property Organisation will always, understandably, lean towards applying the pre-selected tool-set of monopolisation that it refers to as Intellectual Property; a term that we find to be ideologically charged and dangerously oblivious to the significant differences that exist between the many areas of law that it tries to subsume."

They "endorse and support the Geneva Declaration, and invite its drafters, signatories, and the United Nations to start thinking now not only about what the role of WIPO should be, but rather what kind of organisation we need in its place."

In its place they suggest "a World Intellectual Wealth Organisation, dedicated to the research and promotion of novel and imaginative ways to encourage the production and dissemination of knowledge. Granting limited monopolies and limited control over some kinds of knowledge may be part of this new organisations tool-set, but not the only one, and maybe not even the most important one."
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