Civil Society Coalition Statement on WIPO General Assembly Decision on a Development Agenda

October 4, 2004

The Civil Society Coalition (CSC) represents twenty-six non-government organizations from twelve countries, North and South. Our members are concerned with a wide range of issues that are relevant to WIPO, including access to medicine, access to knowledge, and better mechanisms to support creativity activity. We thank WIPO for supporting our application for permanent NGO accreditation. We look forward to contributing to the debate over the development agenda for WIPO, and in particular, the proposed Treaty on Access to Knowledge and Technology. We suggest this Treaty include provisions on topics such as the following:

1. Implementation of Articles 4, 5, 6 and 7 of the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health,

2. Implementation of Articles 7,8 and 40 of the TRIPS regarding the control of anticompetitive practices and the transfer of technology,

3. Global access to publicly funded research,

4. Mechanisms to promote openness, including support for new open access scholarly publishing models, open standards for software and Internet development, open databases, and other instruments of disseminating and transferring knowledge and technology, and other approaches that remove barriers to innovation, and support and empower collaborative approaches to innovation and creativity,

5. Minimum exceptions to patent and copyright laws which are needed to protect the visually impaired, libraries, educators, consumers, and Internet technologies, and which facilitate follow-on creative activities and innovation by authors, performers, researchers and inventors, working both as individuals and within creative communities,

6. Provisions in the Patent Cooperation Treaty to protect standards making organizations, and to better enable collaborative efforts to create public goods, such as databases or standards that will be free of patent claims,

7. Mechanisms, such as those found in the Treaty of Europe, to promote technology transfer and scientific collaboration between richer and lesser developed member states,

We note also there are important topics such as the misappropriation of social and public goods, both modern and traditional, concentrated ownership and control of knowledge, technology and biological resources, and unfair treatment of authors, inventors and other creative persons and communities, and new trade frameworks to support research and development that should be discussed.