Creative Commons statement at WIPO Committee on Development and IP

Read by Yours Truly at the 8th Session of the Committee on Development and Intellectual Property (CDIP).

(Geneva, November 14, 2011)

Thank you Mr Chairman for the opportunity to make a statement; we would like to join other delegates in supporting your chairmanship.

Creative Commons appreciates its continuing engagement with the World Intellectual Property Organization as an observer, and by recently participating in an important workshop on Enabling Creativity in the Digital Environment, which took place in Geneva last month.

As an international nonprofit organization that offers free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with as “some rights reserved”, Creative Commons appreciates the importance of the work of this Committee, and believes that its focus on finding an adequate balance between the interests of users and owners is to be applauded.

We would like to express our support to the work on the Committee on flexibilities in the Intellectual Property system, particularly its work on educating stakeholders through workshops at national and regional level. We also welcome the creation of a web page dedicated solely to highlighting the work on flexibilities, and encourage the Committee to continue with this line of work.

We would also like to compliment the Committee on presenting the Scoping Study on Copyright and Related Rights and the Public Domain (CDIP/7/INF/2) during the 7^th session. We would like to highlight that in the study, Creative Commons was specifically mentioned as a copyright licensing system that allow greater access, identification and location of the public domain.

Similarly, we were extremely pleased to read the excellent study entitled “Taxonomy-Analytical Study for the Project on Open Collaborative Projects and IP-Based Models” (CDIP/8/INF/7). We would like to highlight that this report comments that open source and Creative Commons licensing constitute valid ways to use the intellectual property system to permit owners to allow users to build, modify, and redistribute their works to varying degrees, this in order to respond to the challenges posed by the rapid exchange of information prevalent in digital technologies.

We believe that enabling technology transfer to developing countries is a priority of the international IP system, therefore we welcome the continuing work in this respect. We urge the Committee to continue to champion the interest of developing countries.

Thank you.