Introduction: The Washington Declaration on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest (2012)

INTRODUCTIONThe last weekend in August 2011, between freak earthquake and the arrival of Hurricane Irene, nearly 200 international intellectual property scholars and policy advocates gathered in Washington, D.C., to re-articulate the public interest dimension in intellectual property law and policy.1 The meeting-christened the inaugural Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest- produced the Washington on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest. The text of the Washington follows this introduction. The following pages provide brief overview of the genesis of the network that was assembled at the Congress and of the process used to create its Declaration.I. CONVENING A GLOBAL NETWORKThe Global Congress and the Washington it created were an effort to renew community and rearticulate an that had been under construction since the early 1990s.2 In this effort, the Congress planners relied on and took inspiration from series of influential convenings of scholars and advocates that created strands of global network and defined its aspirations. The Congress was also influenced by the success and instruments of an industry-led enforcement agenda that was drawing increasing attention and resources from the public interest community.One early convening that inspired the Congress was the 1993 meeting on Cultural Agency/Cultural Authority: Politics and Poetics of Intellectual Property in the Post-Colonial Era, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation.3 That meeting mapped scholarly critique of authorship in legal and cultural discourse and produced the Declaration to chart path forward to the future and better recognize the public interest in access to information.4The Bellagio sounded many themes that became recurrent in the public interest community in the coming decades. These included proclamations that intellectual property law has profound effects on broad segments of society, that the structure and assumptions of intellectual property tend to undervalue many important public interest concerns, that there is need for increased attention to doctrines that protect the public domain and the interests of users and developing countries, and call for democratization of the fora in which the international intellectual property regime is debated and decided.5Another set of convenings that were instrumental in creating the network of public interest advocates that the Congress sought to remobilize occurred through the sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation from 2002 to 2006.6 These dialogues followed decade of increased activism in the field, including mobilizations against patents on seeds and genetic resources (from 1993),7 opposition to U.S. Digital Agenda for international copyright expansion (from 1995),8 and promotion of affordable access to patented medicines needed to treat AIDS (from 1999).9 The Bellagio Dialogues sought to support and connect growing global network through series of multiday workshops at residential retreat near Geneva, connected to five-year funding project to promote fairness in international intellectual property policy.10 The series of meetings convened more than 200 advocacy leaders and scholars interested in broad range of issues related to five main threads: global trade and development policy, health, access to plant genetic resources, IP issues facing indigenous peoples, and alternative systems for innovation.11A primary goal and outcome of the Bellagio Dialogues was to serve as focal point for larger community of working across the threads covered at the meetings.12 Workshops built connections primarily by inviting actors from different threads into dialogue on a particular policy goal (see the following figure13).Unlike the 1993 Bellagio meeting, the Dialogues were not focused on producing public statements or deliverables at the meetings themselves. …