Gurry’s Speech to WIPO

Francis Gurry, formerly a Senior Lecturer in Law in the University of Melbourne, was appointed Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in the spring and will take office on October 1. Yesterday he gave an acceptance speech to the the General Assembly of WIPO in which he outlined some of the challenges facing the UN organization and its member states. From the press release:

“The functional consequence of this trend [to harness the economic value of innovation through the acquisition of property rights] is that the system is becoming a victim of its own success” with patent offices “choking on demand and struggling to perform in a manner that is timely enough to be responsive to the needs of the economy”…

Mr. Gurry said the challenges posed with regard to copyright by ever evolving technology were even more fundamental.

“The twentieth century model of returning value to creators, performers and their business associates, which relied on the distribution of physical packages containing the works, is under the most radical of threats from the convergence of expression in digital technology and the distributional power of the Internet,” he declared.

The full text of Mr. Gurry’s talk is available here.