[Foundation-l] WSIS: input from Wikimedia Foundation

[Yann Forget]

Hi,

This is the text which will be submitted to the WSIS by the Education Taks 
Force. The chapter below '''Rights of free access to repositories of 
content''' was added from my recommendation. Critics and suggestions 
welcomed.

Best wishes,
Yann

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/World_Summit_on_Information_Society/Political_chapeau

(...)

== Rights of free access to repositories of content ==

All the previous items cannot expand, produce growth, be diffused unless there 
is a reduction of the present disconnect between the cost of cultural and 
educational products and the duration of copyright and Intellectual Property 
Rights and patents.

The taskforce considers that the WSIS process is a unique chance to clarify 
the categories between what belongs to public domain and what doesn’t. The 
ICTs should facilitate access to existing public domain documents, with 
special indexes and metadata. Nation states should develop policies to help 
users, inform them about their rights and responsibilities and clarify the 
access to these metadata and administrative processes. The current management 
of the rights of access is so complicated so far that they produce chilling 
effects to use and development of materials.

The taskforce strongly recommends the creation of a right of fair use that is 
not constraining. For some data they are theoretically available and free of 
rights but in practice, they are not easy to recuperate or they are too slow 
to access and therefore create frustration. These obstacles are a severe 
impediment to the development of valid teaching materials and reference 
documents that would be otherwise facilitators of scaling up modalities, like 
replicability, modularity and sustainability for education, training and 
research.

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=== Rights of free access ===

The taskforce recognizes the importance of copyright in the interest of 
development of innovation and of faire remuneration of creative work, but it 
upholds that it should be balanced byh a public right of access to knowledge, 
in accordance with the Universal declaration of human rights (art.27). As a 
result it recommends an exemption/exception of Intellectual Property Rights 
for archiving and educating, in the non-profit contexts of education and 
research, like schools, museums, libraries, archives, etc.  

For dissemination of materials the taskforce also recommends partnerships 
between authors, broadcasters and other content producers and the users 
(teachers and students) so as to develop documents together, free of rights, 
to enrich the global commons of culture. Other partnerships can be developed 
as in the case of the self-evolving Wikipedia…

For documents that are not free of rights, the taskforce recommends the 
development of an international mechanism with incremental levels of access, 
according to the amount of years. This amount of years should be the reverse 
of the one that is currently existing. Instead of   increasing the years of 
protection, there should be a cap, that could be located around 30 years with 
a moving wall possible of + or – 3 years, before a document becomes public 
domain. This would present the advantage to give the author the benefit of 
his work during his lifetime, while allowing others to modify it and creating 
innovative forms from it. The authors should be given the option of choosing 
a basic fee for use of their documents before the 30 years deadline. 
In any case, beyond 30 years of publication, documents and patents produced by 
public institutions or co-financed by public funds, should be free of rights 
for education purposes, especially for non-profit education.

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