ABSTRACT
To commence with brief details on my own background, of the 25 years that I have spent at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the first four were spent as a program officer for Asia and the Pacific. I then spent 12 years in the office of the director general (DG), and the last six as a director of the office of Director General Arpad Bogsch (1973-97), who was the predecessor, but one, of current DG Francis Gurry. Therefore, I was senior director, then assistant DG, first of Global Communication, then of Copyright, for four and a half years. In my last three years, I was deputy DG, in charge of development and technical support for the developing world. In addition, I oversaw WIPO’s overall relationship with all the developing member states. That means essentially, for 21 years I had a global view of the entire organization and that gave me a very special perspective on the way it had evolved over the years. This comment will supplement Chapter 4’s focus on the structures,
procedures, systems, and processes within WIPA, with a discussion on the people. All these things matter and make sense only when you “people” the institutions and look at what actually happens when countries, represented by their ambassadors and senior officials, interact with each other and with the secretariat. They give life to these processes and systems. This is where the challenge lies, and is also from where the rewards and the satisfaction would be drawn. I shall supplement the analysis in Chapter 4 by attempting to explain
why there has been such a wide divide between developed and developing countries at WIPO. Considerably more than 50 percent of WIPO’s annual budget is financed out of the surplus of a multilateral arrangement of the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT). This multilateral patent administrative system has some 150 member states; about 40 percent of the gross revenue, however, is derived from use of the system by the United States. In paying the PCT fees for using this system, US
businesses in effect finance a significant part of the WIPO budget. It is not surprising therefore that they have a sense of entitlement-that the organization ought to take on board some of their priorities and concerns. Precisely for that same reason, the developing countries are very worried that this is indeed happening, namely, that the secretariat feels under an obligation towards this major client. Adding to the problem is the fact that European companies and organizations contribute up to about 35 percent of PCT’s revenue. When the two are added together, it means perhaps 80 percent of the budget of WIPO comes from just two continental regions, not to mention Japan. Hence this is not an issue that is going to go away tomorrow,
because as matters stand today the developed countries are still the prime creators and possessors of intellectual property titles and the prime users of the international patent administrative facilities that the organization provides. It is this source of revenue that allows the organization, at the same time, to allocate the significant financial resources needed for technical cooperation required by developing countries. In this context, there is some belief that technical cooperation for developing countries should help them align themselves more closely to the intellectual property (IP) systems that prevail in the developed world and which contribute to the use of WIPO services. On the other hand, developing countries want to ensure that such an alignment should not happen, that technical cooperation should be in response to their national needs and that no other pre-set agenda should be taken into account. In the case of copyright, it was clear that where substantive legal issues were concerned, the developed/developing divide was somewhat less pronounced, although there was a different set of problems then which still remains today. I had the pleasure-meant ironically-of dealing with all that when I was deputy DG. Where WIPO is concerned-and WIPO is not very different from
other multilateral institutions-there are four sources of power and influence. The exercise of either power or influence has a tremendous impact on the institution, its performance and its delivery of results. The first and foremost source is the member states; second would be the secretariat led by the director general, its CEO; and the third would be the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Trailing behind these is a fourth-in the case of WIPO very pertinent, and I suspect at least for quite a few of other agencies as well: the media and the general public, both of which are taking an interest in intellectual property in the current digital age. Explored below is the effect these four groups have on the institution.
