IGF Brazil: Creative Commons Licences For International Organisations, Like WIPO

From the Internet Governance Forum: Remixing WIPO – soon it could be possible that the World Intellectual Property Organization is moving to Creative Commons licences. But could the CC-licenced WIPO material be blocked by new provisions in the prospective WIPO broadcasting treaty?

The World Intellectual Property Organization is in the process to finalising a policy for its use of the Creative Commons licence for intergovernmental organisations (IGOs), Paolo Lanteri from the WIPO copyright law division[corrected] said yesterday during the WIPO Open Forum at the 10th Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Joao Pessoa, Brazil.

While the WIPO webpage already is in line with the alternative copyright licence policy, the Creative Commons logo is not there yet.

Ronaldo Lemos, professor at the Rio de Janeiro State University Law School and Creative Commons Project Lead in Brazil, said during the Open Forum that the general suite of licences for IGOs is ready for the use by IGOs like the World Bank and others in the UN system. The UN Economic, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), World Health Organization, and European agencies have started to use the licences.

The fact that the IGOs are not subject to national jurisdiction made the creation of the CC IGO suite necessary. The CC IGO allowed the different IGOs – 15 originally had come together to work on the issue – to choose from a flexible set of provisions. These would allow, for example, to decide the use of the IGO material for commercial use, for remix or transformation and also make a statement if the derived content had to be CC licenced as well.

A remaining problem, according to Lanteri, was that WIPO intends to share pictures, video, and other material on YouTube and Flickr, “but they don’t give the option to select the IGO licence,” he said.

WIPO officials at the Open Forum also had to answer a few difficult questions, namely one about the potential contradiction between the Creative Common licence effort and potential new rights for webcasters in the draft broadcasters’ rights treaty under negotiation at WIPO.

[Paragraph clarified:] The representative of the Center for Internet and Society of India was concerned with the creation of something that could become “sort of an impediment to the access of works either licenced over Creative Commons or the public domain just because they have been transmitted and, therefore, receiving another layer of rights.” WIPO officials underlined that a distinction had to be made between WIPO acting as a platform for negotiations between member states (i.e., in the case of the negotiations on broadcasting within the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights), and WIPO managing its own resources and taking a decision on how to license and distribute the content it produces.

Participants at the IGF Open Forum were also highly concerned that the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) plus 10 documents which will decide the next potentially 10-year mandate of the IGF had no strong commitment to the importance of the public domain. The IGF was created by the 2005 WSIS. This year a WSIS+10 review is being carried out.

WIPO itself was not mentioned in the WSIS+10 documents, one observer mentioned. For the first decade, copyright, one of the most controversial topics in the internet governance arena, kept a low profile at the IGF meetings. This time there is a dedicated workshop and copyright reform is included in one of the plenary debates.