World Intellectual Property Organization

Dear Delegates,

Aleksandar Stefanovski

Welcome to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) at Harvard National Model United Nations 2012! My name is Aleksandar Stefanovski and I am a senior at Harvard College concentrating in Social Studies. This year, I am writing a senior thesis on the social and political theory of Max Weber in an attempt to analyze the implications of Weber’s account of modern science and his interpretive methodology for modern society. I am also pursuing a language citation in French, which will undoubtedly prove useful if I ever decide to sacrifice my loyalty to German philosophy and pledge my allegiance to French social thought instead.

I was born and raised in Tetovo, a town in the mountainous landscape of northwestern Macedonia, but I went to high school in Skopje, the country’s capital. At Harvard, I have found the warmth of home away from home in the beautiful and remote Pforzheimer House. This year, I am the President of the Woodbridge International Society, a student group that is the home of over 600 international students at Harvard and their American friends. When I’m not dazed and confused in the Harvard bubble, I’m likely to be found in one of the many Cambridge coffeehouses, with a book in the one hand and a coffee cup in the other. If you share my passion for coffee, you have just made a new friend!

For the first time since 2002, and for the second time in nearly 60 years of HNMUN conferences, WIPO will stand out from the numerous other committees containing the best and the brightest delegates in the world with our engaging discussions on copyrights, patents, and other interrelated issues in the field of intellectual property. The first proposed topic is on Access to Knowledge, a movement that seeks to open the findings of culture and science to the greater public and transfer knowledge to the developing world. The second topic is on the legality and legitimacy of pharmaceutical patents, in the wake of the growing interest on healthcare issues in the Western world and the recent criticism of the pharmaceutical industry on the global level.

I look forward to spending unforgettable four days with all of you in February! Until then, do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or you want to introduce yourselves. And get excited!

Sincerely,

Aleksandar Stefanovski
Director, World Intellectual Property Organization
Harvard National Model United Nations 2012

Topic Area A: Access to Knowledge

International property activists all over the world have grounded the Access to Knowledge (A2K) movement in Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which upholds that “[e]veryone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” Many have interpreted Article 27 to advocate for a transfer of knowledge from developed countries to the developing world, mostly in the fields of science and technology, but also in the fields of art and culture.

However, the second part of Article 27 holds that “[e]veryone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.” Yet, the A2K movement, which consists of both academics and human rights activists, have argued that the right to access information is more central to Article 27 than the right to protect the moral and material interests that result from authorship and innovation. For this reason, the A2K movement disagrees with the way intellectual property law currently defines the moral and material interests of the author and vouches to change these definitions in order to achieve an adequate transfer of knowledge that would narrow the gap between developed and developing countries.

The recent growth of open-source software on the Internet has presented an opportunity to discuss the basics of the A2K movement in greater detail, by focusing on three particular aspects of the issue. First, since the A2K movement seeks merely to change the content and interpretation of intellectual property laws without abolishing them, the most pressing issue is to discuss the exceptions and limitations of intellectual property laws such as copyrights, patents, etc. Second, the A2K movement needs to address the opposition to open access to knowledge. Critics have argued that there are certain areas of knowledge that must be kept secret in order to ensure public safety and social stability. Finally, the answers to the first two questions would inevitably determine the extent to which WIPO would provide free and open source software, open access research archives, and public-domain scientific databases in the future, all of which are capable of changing the way in which societies generate and utilize scientific knowledge for future economic, social, and technological progress.

Topic Area B: Access to Medicines

The criticism of patents, perhaps the most well-known component of intellectual property activism, is often grounded in the necessity of curing some of the world’s most troublesome diseases and preventing tragic epidemics through the free and open usage of patent-worthy medical drugs. Most notably, arguments against patents in the fields of healthcare and pharmaceutics often relate to the necessity to use HIV and AIDS drugs in the developing world. Many governing entities in the developing world and numerous activists in the Western world strongly believe that human lives are more valuable than the protection of patents, the system of intellectual property law, and the business interests of pharmaceutical companies.           In March 2002, for example, Thailand’s Government Pharmaceutical Organization began producing and marketing HIV/AIDS drugs that decreased the cost of anti-retroviral therapy from $500-750 to only $30. Similarly, in 2007, the government of Brazil pressured Merck & Co. to either negotiate lower prices with the Brazilian government for Merck’s anti-retroviral drug or allow Brazil to disqualify Merck’s patent on Brazilian territory altogether. In recent years, many Western pharmaceutical companies have responded to public pressure all throughout the developing world by decreasing prices of individual patented drugs in developing countries.

Yet, the issue of the legality and legitimacy of pharmaceutical patents has not been sufficiently addressed yet, as the international community today does not have a solid uniform opinion on the content and interpretation of patent law in the context of pharmaceutical drugs. WIPO faces the challenge of finding a balance between intellectual property law and human rights, such as the inalienable right to law and the right to health. The implications of this legal debate are extremely relevant to the future of the pharmaceutical industry, the social welfare of the developing world, and the growth of international law.