WIPO is a biased organization – bad for IP.

The World Intellectual Property Organization, a United Nations agency, has come under fire from a range of regional and global groups representing key public interest components of the copyright system for unfairly catering to rights holder interests in an ongoing series of regional meetings, resulting in sharply biased outcomes of the meetings.

The groups say they were excluded from participating on equal footing with other stakeholders, giving days of extra time to others to lobby officials from national and regional copyright offices. This provides support for the notion that WIPO and the copyright system are pursuing a mission to protect copyright holders, they argue, ignoring other creators, the public interest, and exceptions and limitations.

According to sources, representatives of libraries, educators and other public interest institutions arrived to a seminar on copyright exceptions only to find that they we were not included in a 2-day pre-meeting in which publishing industry representatives participated in great numbers. They discovered to their chagrin that the pre-meeting resulted in a “Nairobi Declaration” that focused exclusively on increasing rights and licensing options toward addressing what some refer to as a “book famine” in Africa.