These are interesting times for folks immersed in Intellectual Property law and policy, as you might discern from this excerpt from a post by Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing:
“EFF and other public interest groups are back at the United Nations this week, at the World Intellectual Property Organization’s meeting of the “Provisional Committee on Proposals Related to a Development Agenda.” This is the meeting where the nuts-and-bolts of how WIPO will turn itself into an actual humanitarian agency, instead of what it has done traditionally: help rich countries and their multinationals screw the developing world.
“The public interest groups continue to subversively write down what’s going on and publish it, something that WIPO’s Secretariat once described as “abusing WIPO’s hospitality” — normally, the Secretariat would release a report six months after the fact, once everyone quoted in it had the chance to revise the report of what they’d said. EFF and others publish their account of the WIPO deliberations daily — twice a day, when it’s going hot and heavy — and it gets slashdotted, read by delegates’ bosses in their capitols, and distributed. It has a genuinely disruptive effect on the orderly dividing-and-conquering of the world that’s underway there.” …
So why am I bringing this up at a “Feminist Law Professors” blog? Because the title of the post is “How the US is boning the developing world at WIPO.” Yes, “boning,” as in having dominant, penetrative sex with, thereby treating developing nations as if they are, ick, female. It’s a mindset I get very tired of.
–Ann Bartow
