Dear Reader,
Welcome to the first issue of Intellectual Property Watch! Established in the summer of 2004, Intellectual Property Watch is a journalistic initiative created to report on the interests and ‘behind the scenes’ dynamics which influence the design and implementation of intellectual property policies.
The goal of Intellectual Property Watch is straightforward—to promote transparency, accountability and fairness in global intellectual property policymaking. Our target audience is people like you—whether from civil society organisations, industry, government and intergovernmental organisations, the scientific community or the academy.
In both developed and developing countries, public concerns about the distribution of knowledge, access to information, the affordability of technologies, R&D priorities, and the patterns and pace of innovation have provoked active policy debate. In this context, none can dispute the need for informed public discussion about the most appropriate policies to help stimulate and make widely available the benefits of knowledge, creativity and innovation. To help advance that conversation, Intellectual Property Watch aims to make more transparent processes which are often murky and hard to understand, in which repeat-players have a considerable advantage, and in which information about the interests driving particular proposals is often unavailable to all but the best-connected.
Intellectual Property Watch will report on an ongoing basis. Articles and features will be posted regularly on our website in a dynamic blog format—with several options for keeping you up-to-date with new postings. A hard copy of the Monthly Reporter with a selection of articles, features, interviews and commentaries will be distributed by mail to subscribers (and free of charge to developing country policymakers and NGOs).
Intellectual Property Watch will hold itself to high standards of care and precision in the gathering of facts. If provoked by our reporting, we encourage you to send us your views for publication on our “Letters” page—which will be a regular feature of future issues. All of our
reporting, print and online, will be covered by Creative Commons Licenses, which will permit widescale, free non-commercial reproduction and translation of our work.
Intrigued? Then visit our website to sign up for notifications, add us to your RSS feed (for the techies among you) and subscribe to the hard copy.
For the curious among you, our website also contains information about our governance, funding, and reporting principles (www.ip-watch.org). To end, I would like to offer my warmest thanks to all of those upon whose generosity and advice we have relied in order to make Intellectual Property Watch a reality.
Carolyn Deere
Chair, Board of Directors