The World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) is organizing on October 29 and 30, 2007 at its Geneva headquarters an International Conference on Intellectual Property and the Creative Industries.

IBM has just announced a new corporate policy regarding its "behavior when helping to create open technical standards".

It's fascinating to see governments around the world embrace open source as a way to boost local economies and improve sovereignty. It's even better when the policy process itself is laid bare, allowing outsiders to see the partisan meddling that goes into a publicly articulated policy.

"There are many Policy change proposals, including some obvious and uncontroversial ones, that didn't make it into this release. That doesn't mean they've been rejected, only that a Policy release was long-overdue and it was better to set a deadline and upload what was finished by that deadline than postpone it further. I expect that 3.7.4.0 will not be far in the future..."

Last Friday I had the pleasure of speaking at Tsinghua University in Beijing at an IBM-sponsored conference attended by over 200 government officials, business leaders, and academicians to discuss the confluence of three important topics: open standards, innovation, and intellectual property policy.

"...We need a World Intellectual Wealth Organisation, dedicated to the research and promotion of novel and imaginative ways to encourage the production and dissemination of knowledge..."

RMS (speaking in context of the Debian GFDL policy) : «Debian's policy is foolish and unfriendly to us. So we do not cater to it. If they don't like the results, they should change the policy. [...] Debian's policy starts from good motives, but they were too rigid in carrying them out, and reached a foolish conclusion.

Kerala IT policy envisions an inclusive knowledge society, but it still remains just words. There is no effort to implement the policy in any of the initiatives the government is taking. The recent incident is the tax filing application which mandates use of Microsoft Excel fomat for tax filings and the macro does not work with Free Software replacements like Open Office Calc.

Barack Obama promises to be the most technologically attuned U.S. president ever.