Last updated: June 1, 2005
(For those who wish to learn more, see my report from the first meeting.)
This time, May 12-13 2005, the 60ish participants met in an university lecture hall in eastern London. The community was even more heavily dominated by people working for consumer-oriented organizations and in the legal academic sector - and, of course, just a handful of people from the south had been able to make the trip.
It was agreed at the outset that people could quote freely what was said at the meeting, but only use names with the permission of the speaker; Cory Doctorow and Jamie Love gave blanket permission to use their words.
The focus of the meeting was quite different from the previous one; this was no longer a gathering of ideas, this was the shaping of thse ideas into a common platform and a common tool: the draft a2k treaty.
This document is the collection of a number of instruments, aimed at different targets, but all sharing a common direction: That of improving the access to knowledge for people who today feel that owners and controllers of intellectual property are using the IPR laws to keep knowledge inaccessible or unusable.
This includes, among others:
The list is very long, and could be even longer. It's a wonder of this process that so many different people, with so many different worries, are banding together and searching for a way to make common cause under the banner of "access to knowledge" - or "A2K", as it's starting to become known.
The form of the treaty proposal is that of an agreement between nations - because the authors (probably rightly) believe that no power base short of an intergovernmental treaty can make the necessary changes to how the markets of today handle knowledge. They point to the Berne convention, the TRIPS treaty, the GATT agreements and so on as examples of treties that have had powerful effects - by changing how countries' laws are put together.
It's a clear problem how this document would fit into these other treaties - governments are not very happy about entering into conflicting agreements, especially if the "other" agreement is somehow of vital importance to their economy. However, often it's not the treaties that are the problem, but the ways in which particular countries or arbiters (WIPO, for instance) have chosen to interpret certain paragraphs - if one could imagine changing that habit of interpretation, or ask countries to choose one reasonable interpretation rather than another, much could be done without requiring changes in those other treaties.
And, of course, many treaties already conflict - if you look at them in a certain way. So there may still be plenty of room for maneuvring.
It's unclear to me how the drivers of this process expect to reach their goals. It seems likely that the so-called "Friends of Development" group (14 countries which have submitted some joint proposals to WIPO in this area) are willing to sponsor the proposals as part of their proposals in the intergovernmental fora that deal with this sort of stuff. And it is clear that the organizations like the EFF and CPTech represented here will use their considerable expertise in mobilization and attention-gathering within the industrialized countries to bring focus on the issue of "IP rights gone wild", as they'd call it.
The people who participate here are thoughtful people. They see that all these issues surrounding IPR have lots of aspects - good things as well as bad things. But the nature of the "marketplace of ideas" is such that only by painting the issues in stark black and white will they be able to get enough attention to get the issues on the agenda.
There are lots of people who currently identify themselves with the "other side" - experts associated with the bodies that make a living off IPR, such as the RIAA, MPAA, WIPO, various patent offices, as well as the patent/IPR branches of major companies. These people often portray the issue equally black and white, but in the opposite polarity - that it is "obvious" that IPR protection is beneficial to society, helps less developed nations improve their lot, and is vitally needed for economic growth and fair trade. And they have lots of past history to show that their view is justifiable.
The important thing in the long run of the A2K process may be that it allows us to say "no, it's not obvious" when we are discussing the issues for real. That we are forced to think through the issues, look for the tradeoffs and find the balance points that benefit society.
That may not be a glamorous undertaking. And it'll certainly be a long process.
But it's a challenge worth undertaking.