Tag: international copyright law

WIPO, Wandering, and a Week with the Archives: Some Quick Notes from Geneva

Image from here.

Namaskar.

I write this as I return from a whirlwind week in Geneva—a city I had long longed to visit. Partly because of my PhD work, partly because of its place in the history of international (IP) law, and partly because some cities acquire an almost mythical quality when you spend years reading about them before ever setting foot in them. Geneva was one such city.

Thankfully, SciencesPo generously provided the funding that made this long-standing wish a reality.

Much like I did after my archival adventures at the British Library in London, I thought I’d set down a few practical notes for those interested in conducting research at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO).

As I have noted before, archival research can often feel intimidating, especially when the institution in question happens to be one of the most influential international organisations in the IP universe. Throw in layers of bewildering bureaucracy, security protocols, institutional formalities, and dare I say …. enough acronyms to populate a small dictionary, and things can appear rather daunting.

If that’s what you’re thinking, I hear you, dost. I do, yes, I do.

But here’s the good news: WIPO is far more accessible than one might imagine. Like many large institutions, it becomes significantly less intimidating once you find the right person to guide you through its labyrinthine corridors—both literal and metaphorical.

In my case, that person was Dr Edward Kwakwa, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at a conference in Finland last year, organised by a dear friend and mentor, Dr Daniel Acquah. An honest ask, a sincere follow-up and voila — an archival aspiration suddenly became a practical possibility.

For those uninitiated, WIPO is the United Nations specialised agency for intellectual property, established in 1967. Depending on where one positions oneself politically, WIPO is either a champion of global innovation, a sophisticated vehicle for the internationalisation of Western IP norms, or—as is often the case—a fascinating olio of all of the above.

Whatever your ideological inclinations, if your interests lie in the history of IP, international law, development, technology governance, or the broader politics of knowledge production, WIPO’s archives are a treasure trove. Buried within those boxes and files are stories of negotiations and norm-making, diplomatic dramas and developmental debates, institutional anxieties and geopolitical ambitions, and competing visions of the global knowledge order—some forgotten, some flourishing, and some still fighting for relevance today.

So if any of that sounds remotely interesting, make the trip.

First Things First: Thanks to Sahana and Colin!

Before I get to the practicalities, two people deserve special mention.

The first is my dear friend and colleague, Sahana Simha, currently a fellow at WIPO. Sahana not only hosted me but also shepherded me through the peculiar puzzles of a new city and a new institution! Every researcher needs a friendly local guide; I had the good fortune of finding one. She is the reason my first day—and indeed my entire stay—was considerably less chaotic than it might otherwise have been. May all travelling researchers be blessed with a Sahana-esque host. 

The second is Colin Wells, Archives Management Officer at WIPO. I can’t emphasise this enough that archivists and librarians are the unsung heroes of historical research. We academics may eventually get our names etched onto articles and books, but archivists and librarians are the people who rescue order from chaos, retrieve forgotten files, and, of course, save us from ourselves.

Colin did all of this with praiseworthy patience and precision. He arranged materials in advance, answered (or perhaps endured) my endless questions, and ensured that my limited time in Geneva was spent reading documents rather than chasing them.

I am deeply grateful to both of them. May their tribe increase!!!

Now … comes the Practical Bit

A small caveat at the outset: WIPO’s archival programme is still something of a work in progress. Unlike older institutions whose archival systems have been polished over decades, WIPO’s Archives department is still in its salad days—growing, evolving, and finding its feet. But do not mistake juvenescence for inefficiency. The team is helpful and even enthusiastic about facilitating research.

The key is simple: plan early and coordinate carefully.

The first step is to identify relevant files from WIPO’s archival catalogue, which can be obtained by contacting <wipoarchives@wipo.int>. Alternatively, you can simply send a general query and seek their advice. Once you have a sense (or at least an inkling?) of what you need, contact the archives team with your specific request. Subsequently, they will review the materials, determine accessibility, and guide you through the process.

As you might imagine, WIPO is not the sort of place where one simply saunters in with a notebook, a laptop, and an oozing optimism. Security is taken rather seriously. Dates have to be coordinated well in advance, and once your visit is approved, the archives team will alert security and ask for your identification details beforehand. You will then be issued a visitor badge, which must be faithfully collected each morning and surrendered at the end of the day (no, this is not negotiable). The library is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. And they are, in the nicest possible way, quite strict about those hours.

Once all that is done… voilà… You have successfully navigated Geneva’s gentlest gauntlet of bureaucracy. You will then be allowed in the WIPO Library within the main complex. This became my temporary habitat from Monday through Friday, where I sifted through files and scanned a potpourri of pages.

One of the curious joys of archival research is that you may arrive with one question and leave with twenty more. The WIPO archives, which I am only beginning to pore over carefully, will be no exception. Given my limited time, I confined myself largely to materials relevant to my immediate interests—the discourse surrounding international copyright law between roughly 1900 and 1950.

Even then, the archive kept tempting me down new paths. I will share some stories in the coming days here at this site, at SpicyIP, or IPRMENT. Keep an eye on the space.

In sum, if you are considering archival research at WIPO, my advice is simple: plan ahead, contact the archives team early through the above-mentioned email ID, be patient with the process, and leave ample room for serendipity. Well … the archives may be carefully catalogued, but the most delightful discoveries seldom are.

Such is (archival!) life.

I hope these notes prove useful to anyone contemplating a research trip to Geneva. If you have questions about the process, do leave them in the comments, and I’ll do my best to answer.

Happy hunting.

LV

P.S. An unexpected yield of the visit was a rapid introduction to Bangalorean English. By week’s end, I was emboldened enough to confidently tell Sahana, “Macha, put off one scene, no!” Quite what I meant by this—and whether I used it in the correct context—remains shrouded in uncertainty (just like unexcavated archives). But it is, without question, a linguistic achievement that may ultimately outlast anything I unearthed in the archives.

See you in the next post!

An Interesting 1965 Piece: International Copyright and the Soviet Union by Allan P. Cramer

Image from here

Namaskar/Salam

So the other day …. I fell, most unwillingly but quite happily, down a rather curious piece (though I confess I only truly read it now, as one does with the more tempting of intellectual distractions! Alas, life is such).

It was a piece from 1967 in the Duke Law Journal, a slender sixteen-page text … dressed in all the full regalia of the American law review tradition. I mean … the dense, deliberate, and detailedly footnoted text, as though the citations are contesting for attention with the text they adorn.

But there is something else as well that ignites my interest in this piece. For one, there is, I find, something rather beguiling about writing on Soviet copyright discourse. It remains strangely under-visited in English scholarship, or at least, not easily sighted in the usual mainstream historical scholarship. Perhaps it is hiding in some archives acloves, carrying the digital dust … awaiting more patient, more persistent pursuers. At times, I suspect I ought to search more earnestly; there is likely an entire cartography of thought yet unmapped.

Secondly, as I suggested above, I liked the citations of this piece, which detour into forgotten corners, pause for brief historical asides, and occasionally seem to breathe with a life of their own. One begins to feel (at least I did) that the author took greater pleasure in the footnotes than in the main text itself.

(Well … if one were ever inclined toward an IP trivia night, this is the sort of piece one would chip in, quietly and watch the room slowly realise that copyright discourse is far more entertaining than it had dared to assume.)

But I shall not linger in preamble any longer. Below follows the citation of the piece, and thereafter a fragment of its introduction

Citation: Allan P. Cramer, International Copyright and the Soviet Union, 1965 Duke Law Journal 531-545 (1965). Available at: https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/dlj/vol14/iss3/3

INTRODUCTION (footnotes omitted)

THE COPYRIGHT laws of a country have no extraterritorial application. Nevertheless, practically every nation in the world, by adherence to either bilateral or multilateral treaties or conventions, protects copyrights of foreign nationals. The Soviet Union alone among the major world powers has refused to recognise international copyright and does not adhere to any treaty or convention for the protection of copyrights. As a result, that country’s state-controlled publishing firms have, generally without seeking permission or paying royalties, printed whatever foreign works they felt were suitable for Soviet minds. During the period from 1917-1950, it has been estimated that one billion copies of books protected by foreign copyright were published in the Soviet Union. Among these were more than seventy-seven million copies of 2700 books by some 200 United States authors, including Jack London, Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Erskine Caldwell, Sin-clair Lewis, John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway.” Numerous foreign scientific and technical publications, short stories, plays10 and miscellaneous articles¹¹ have also been published in the U.S.S.R. Thus, that country has been characterized as “the world’s most active literary pirate.”This article will consider various reasons for the Soviet Union’s position concerning international copyright. In addition, it will outline some attempts which have been made to change the Soviet view and evaluate future prospects for the solution of the problem.

Do take a look at the piece. Happy reading …

See you in the next post.

A bientôt.

Interesting Reading: 19th Century’s Conference Culture and Belgium’s Soft Power

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(This post continues a series where I share readings that I’ve found useful or, at the very least, intellectually stimulating. See here and here.)

Salam/Namaskar

The nineteenth century was somewhat a moment for international law. It was marked by a distinctive, I’d say, thought style in which organising international congresses to address perceived “social problems” became almost a thing. Intellectual property (IP) treaties were no exception. The late nineteenth century, as Bentley and Sherman claim, was a period of consolidation of IP laws and the beginnings of IP expertise as a specialised legal field. (Its a must-read book for IP history enthusiasts!)

I recently chanced upon two pieces that speak nicely to this broader historical moment, and I think our readers here may find them both useful and intriguing. Before pasting their abstracts below, let me briefly flag what they offer.

The first piece looks at the international congresses held between 1846 and 1914. ‘Tis a short yet sharp account of the early conference culture of internationalism—mapping not only the sheer proliferation of such meetings, but also the kinds of ideas, aspirations, and even anxieties that circulated within them. It can be a useful piece for someone willing to dig deeper into this topic. For those interested in IP like me, this can turn useful in tracing the genealogy of international copyright law.

Belgium, as is well known, emerges as a key site in this history. Brussels hosted a remarkable number of international copyright meetings, most notably the 1858 Congress, arguably the first serious attempt to forge the foundation of international copyright law, which would later become the Berne Convention. The second piece offers why Belgium came to organise so many international congresses in the first place. These congresses functioned as a form of soft power.

Read together, these pieces help situate international copyright law not merely as a doctrinal or treaty-based development, but as part of a wider nineteenth-century culture of conferencing, expertise-building, and international problem-solving—one where law, politics, and power were deeply intertwined.

Okay, here are the readings:

Christophe Verbruggen et al, Social Reform International Congresses and Organizations (1846–1914): From Sources to Data, Journal of Open Humanities Data (2022)

TIC-Collaborative was a collaborative digital humanities project that focused on transnational intellectual cooperation (TIC) in the long nineteenth century, in particular on transnational connections in the field of social reform. The dataset contains information on over 1650 international congresses and 450 organizations and conference series related to the social question. The project focussed on the Low Countries and a selection of reform areas.

The piece also provides a gripping graph showing how the congresses escalated after 1845, see page 4

“Social reform international congresses and organizations, 1846–1914”

DAVID AUBIN, Congress Mania in Brussels, 1846—1856: Soft Power, Transnational Experts, and Diplomatic Practices, 50(4) Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (2020) pp. 340-363 (24 pages)

In 1853, the director of the Belgium Royal Observatory, Adolphe Quetelet, welcomed delegates from several countries to two consecutive meetings that have acquired considerable reputation as the first international congresses of, respectively, mete- orology and statistics. This paper examines the local context where several similar international congresses (on free trade, universal peace, prison reform, public hygiene, etc.) were organized in the same decade. It argues that the new Belgian state developed this new form of international conference in order to bolster its soft power in the Concert of Nations. It also discusses tensions between national interests and global beliefs in the efficiency of science, which arose from these congresses.

On a tangential (but highly recommended) note, do check out this beautifully penned piece by my dearest friend Shivam Kaushik, How India Learnt to Stop Complaining and Love Copyright. It pairs rather well with the themes discussed here.

Okay, that’s it for this post! See you in the next post.