REGENT’S NOW FEATURES
WIPO
In Conversation with Dr Francis Gurry
Alumnus Professor Sir Malcolm Evans sits down with the former Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organisation Malcolm Evans: Which paths have led you to significant achievements both personally and by WIPO during your time with them? Francis Gurry: Malcolm Evans As you know better than I, international cooperation is a very difficult task. To actually accomplish an agreement - whether a formal treaty, or a practical arrangement between states - is a very difficult thing to achieve, because you have such inequalities in the world. Just as a minor example, if you look at investment in research and development, the US invests $540 billion in research and development every year, and China invests
REGENT’S PARK COLLEGE
|
OXFORD
about $480 billion. Those two sums are more than the individual GDP of 160 countries. So, you have the two superpowers, - and I know I’m comparing apples and oranges - investing more in the creation of new knowledge than 160 countries have at their disposal for security, defence, health, infrastructure, and all the other public goods that we expect of the government. So, I don’t think you can exaggerate the inequalities in this world, and those in the field of technology are exacerbated by the speed of change in technology and by these enormous sums of investment. In that context, I think about what we managed to do in terms of formal treaties. For example, we concluded a treaty for giving access for blind and visually impaired persons to published works. If you take Harry Potter, there was an exception at the national level to break copyright to make an accessible format
copy of the book, for example a Braille copy, where there was no commercially available copy in in the accessible format. But, the exception being national law, it meant that a separate braille copy of Harry Potter was produced in the UK, in Canada, in the United States, in Australia and in New Zealand. Well, that’s a waste – four other books which could have been made into a Braille copy. But it happened because these exceptions were national law exceptions to the nationally applicable copyright. What the treaty did was create an international rule that you must have such an exception, and the exceptions at the national level must be able to talk to each other. That was one of my most heart-warming experiences because by the time we got through the process of negotiation, everyone was on board. Usually in international affairs a measure of success is that everyone is equally unhappy, and this was a rare instance of everyone being equally happy!
