Francis Gurry, director-general of the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), says the solution to illegal P2P piracy isn’t “putting teenagers in jail.”
Francis Gurry, director-general of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a UN agency created in 1967 “to encourage creative activity, to promote the protection of intellectual property throughout the world,” gave a speech at the opening of India’s 5th International Forum on Creativity and Inventions in which he stressed that jailing convicted illegal file-sharers was not the solution to piracy.
“I don’t believe we are going to win this, (to) find the solution by putting teenagers in jail,” said Gurry. “I think that is not going to win public sympathy.”
“Part of the battle here is to sensitize the public to the fact that there is a real issue involved. It is not simply a victimless crime,” he added.
He noted that the real problem is the enormous amount of stress that the copyright system is under as the world evolves from physical to digital media. consumption.
At the same conference India’s Minister for Commerce and Industry Anand Sharma remarked that there needs to be a better balance in intellectual property systems.
While rights holders needs a secure environment to protect their profits, it is equally important to ensure that the benefits of innovation and knowledge are shared. In this respect, he underlined the need to ensure universal health and education, to alleviate poverty and to reduce the knowledge divide.
It was just a few days prior that both Brazil and Pakistan submitted proposals to a meeting of the WIPO’s Advisory Committee on Enforcement in which they too said that piracy enforcement can’t be a “one size fits all approach,” and that some countries have a different economic reality.
While no country has discussed physically jailing illegal file-sharers, some countries like France and South Korea have enacted “three-strikes” legislation that effectively creates a locked door to the online world.
Stay tuned.
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It more or less blew me away to see Pakistan of all countries jumping up and demanding sane legislation…the country is torn in half between the taliban and the ordinary joes, suffers from rampaging poverty, has a megalomaniacal dictator for a ruler known for such stunts as selling North Korea the tech to build nukes, has a police force more corrupt and apt to violence than any other nation which even has police…and who continually threaten open nuclear exchange with India over Kashmir. Somehow I can't get this together…
Brazil, at least, i can understand, but Pakistan??
These countries with sound reasoning are the ones that are likely to take over power from the U.S. who is suffering from too many years of greed and ignoring the public. The western. economy is unstable due to years of governments giving in to corporate demands, decimating the foundation that made innovation thrive. Now these budding economies are supporting sound logic, rather than money and they will surely benefit.
Whats sad too is that these developing countries, usually bastions of official corruption, are the only ones demanding honest, untainted piracy figures.
Kind of sad western govts dont expect the same.