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Aventis, Bayer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Hoffmann-La Roche, Glaxo-
SmithKline, IBM, Motorola, Novartis, Pfizer, and Searle.) It included
the Global Positioning System, which Ronald Reagan set free in the
early 1980s. And it included “open source and free software.”
The aim of the meeting was to consider this wide range of projects
from one common perspective: that none of these projects relied upon
intellectual property extremism. Instead, in all of them, intellectual
property was balanced by agreements to keep access open or to impose
limitations on the way in which proprietary claims might be used.
From the perspective of this book, then, the conference was ideal. 7
The projects within its scope included both commercial and noncommercial
work. They primarily involved science, but from many perspectives.
And WIPO was an ideal venue for this discussion, since
WIPO is the preeminent international body dealing with intellectual
property issues.
Indeed, I was once publicly scolded for not recognizing this fact
about WIPO. In February 2003, I delivered a keynote address to a
preparatory conference for the World Summit on the Information Society
(WSIS). At a press conference before the address, I was asked
what I would say. I responded that I would be talking a little about the
importance of balance in intellectual property for the development of
an information society. The moderator for the event then promptly interrupted
to inform me and the assembled reporters that no question
about intellectual property would be discussed by WSIS, since those
questions were the exclusive domain of WIPO. In the talk that I had
prepared, I had actually made the issue of intellectual property relatively
minor. But after this astonishing statement, I made intellectual
property the sole focus of my talk. There was no way to talk about an
“Information Society” unless one also talked about the range of information
and culture that would be free. My talk did not make my immoderate
moderator very happy. And she was no doubt correct that the
scope of intellectual property protections was ordinarily the stuff of
CONCLUSION 263