I admit that I await each issue of Intelligent Life Magazine from The Economist with excitement, if not bated breath. The spine for the last quarter reads “Knowledge is Pleasure” – which it certainly is sometimes, but as I read the magazine I realised that sometimes it clearly isn’t. Knowledge can bring pain and fear and if it is the sense that we make of information (see my previous blog), knowledge certainly includes mistakes. So how can knowledge be owned or traded, and how indeed can a price be put on it?
Archive for September, 2009
Knowledge definitions (2)
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009WIPO General Assemblies 2009: Reflections on the Report of the Director General
Sunday, September 27th, 2009Sisule F. Musungu – Dr. Francis Gurry’s Report to the Members States of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) at the opening of the 2009 General Assemblies can be summed up as a call to rethinking and reshaping culture, systems, governance, norms and strategy. How WIPO’s culture evolves, how the global intellectual property (IP) system is governed and reshaped for the 21st Century, the balance in the norms that are generated by the organization and the strategy for engagement and dialogue will determine the contribution of WIPO to addressing today’s pressing global challenges; from development through to tackling climate change. In this post, I offer some reflections on where WIPO is one year into the new administration and on the DG’s thoughts on the challenges going forward.
WIPO General Assemblies 2009 – High Level Ministerial Segment
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009Sisule F. Musungu – The 2009 WIPO General Assemblies opens today with, for the first time, a highly anticipated high level ministerial segment. According to a press statement released by WIPO, this segment of the Assemblies will bring together over forty ministers to discuss “national IP priorities”. WIPO argues that this high level segment reflects the importance of intellectual property (IP) in senior-policy making levels. It is worthwhile to look abit deeper and think about the implications of this new development at WIPO.
Who Owns the HIV Genome Knowledge and Why the Deafening Silence?
Monday, September 7th, 2009Hope you didn’t blink the other week or you may have missed the fact that they have mapped the HIV genome. It was in the journal Nature, on the BBC News and on Medical News Today website, among others. It’s great news as it opens up all sorts of health benefits. My worry is that it may not be great news for everyone, and the point is that the public does not know who owns the information and, therefore, does not know who can benefit or at what cost.
