IP: HMmm I like this -- The Battle of Seattle

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

> X-Sender: jcamp () camail1 harvard edu
> Date: Tue, 7 Dec 1999 14:57:25 -0500
> To: farber () cis upenn edu
> From: Jean Camp <Jean_Camp () harvard edu>
> Subject: Re: IP: The Battle of Seattle
>
> While not a radical communist (altho the way I pronounce "Linux install-in"
> with Southern may fool you) I was very happy to see the WTO meeting
> collapse.
>
> Boys and girls, they were going to make Intellectual Property decisions.
> The main focus would be to prevent this nasty always-on Xerox machine from
> making things harder for intellectual property owners. The odds that a
> group of international trade-centric wonk wanna-bes (many of whom are
> appointed for the vast contributions made to campaigns or possibly being a
> popular cousin) would get intellectual property right is very very close to
> zero. I know many people at Harvard and across the globe struggling with
> developing a new definition of intellectual property that is sufficiently
> rigid to provide protection and suffciently flexible to allow innovation
> but no one I know has an answer. The WTO doesn't even know the questions.
>
> We should all take a collective bow to the protesters. They may well have
> saved us from global software patents and UCITA as the Internet standard
> for transactions. Because the question was not, "Will the WTO get
> intellectual property right?", the question was, "How wrong can the WTO
> possibly be?"
>
> I thank the protesters, and everyone on the Internet now or who will use it
> in the future owes a debt to the protesters.
>
> -Prof. Jean
> Kennedy School of Gov't