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The World Intellectual Property Organization General Assembly adopted the Development Agenda in September 2007, after three years of acrimonious debate. The Agenda radically transforms WIPO's mandate and reverberates throughout the international intellectual property regime, including in ongoing battles within the World Trade Organization over the future direction of “TRIPS”, the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property. Yet despite its powerful symbolic message, the full extent of the Development Agenda's actual impact on the ground, both within WIPO and without, remains to be seen. This chapter places the WIPO Development Agenda in the context of evolving development policy generally, discusses the Agenda's principal provisions, and summarizes the multifarious contributions to the book.

This chapter explores the technology-related focus of the IP-development linkage and outlines WIPO's role in the initial development paradigm, which prevailed from 1964 to 2004 when a proposal for a WIPO Development Agenda was first submitted. It then examines the WIPO Development Agenda in light of this history and identifies possible paradigm shifts discernible both in the structure of the Agenda and in preliminary considerations regarding its implementation. Finally, the chapter suggests a number of ways to interpret the WIPO Development Agenda and reflects briefly on how these different “faces” of the Agenda might inform WIPO's institutional role in responding to a spectrum of development interests in an era of rapid technological transformation.

This chapter discusses the landscape metaphors that were very frequently used to regulate and describe access to knowledge. By imaging knowledge as a series of outdoor spaces, subject to a greater or lesser degree of human intervention, and accessible to a greater or lesser range of human characters, these metaphors of gardens, wildernesses, pastoral, and picturesque landscapes staged debates about who should be able to learn what in early 19th-century Britain as a tussle between nature and culture. The chapter asks how spatial rhetorics were mobilized to manage access to knowledge in the face of strong pressures at once to enlarge and to control popular engagement in education. Using evidence from both popular and elite texts, it explores the political implications of the particular kinds of spatial metaphor most widely deployed, focusing especially on arguments and anxieties about individualism, conquest, and exploration.

It is widely accepted that research exceptions are one of the legitimate exceptions to the exclusivity granted by patent rights. In principle, a robust research exception can fuel follow-on innovation, ward off "patent thicket" problems, and mitigate refusals to license. Yet, a comparative analysis of the research exception in the US, Europe, and Japan shows that, as far as a general research exception does exist, its boundaries often are unclear and confusing. This chapter revisits the role and the impact of the research exception in an "open innovation" setting. The core research question the chapter seeks to address is how open and collaborative innovation challenges the concept, rationale, and scope of the research exception, and whether current national research exceptions can effectively deal with regional and global, large-scale collaborations. The chapter applies a two-step approach. First, it describes and analyzes the content and scope of the current research exceptions in the US, Europe, and Japan. Next, it assesses and evaluates the current regimes using the property rights/liability rules dichotomy as an analytical framework, enabling us to detect deficiencies and suggest routes for improvement.

This chapter presents the concluding part of the book and analyzes new global governance ideologies and scopes in the Internet-enabled world. It also discusses the challenges of nation-states in securing cyberspace, revisits the concept of multistakeholderism in Internet politics, and briefly emphasizes the Access to Knowledge element along with some important concepts of the preceding chapters. The chapter concludes with a note on cyber-libertarianism, and states that the requirement of future frameworks is inevitable in securing the Internet and its governance.