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
>