A World Intellectual Wealth Organisation (WIWO) has been proposed as an alternative to the World Intellectual Property Organization. It would be dedicated to the research and promotion of novel and imaginative ways to encourage the production and dissemination of knowledge.
Granting limited monopolies and limited control over some kinds of knowledge (e.g. with patents, copyrights, etc.) may be part of this new organization's tool-set, but not the only one, and maybe not even the most important one.
The proposal was published in October 2004. It is inspired by the Geneva Declaration on the Future of the World Intellectual Property Organization and came from the Free Software Foundation Europe, which is dedicated to the enhancement of free software, free content, open content and other forms of libre copyright approaches by the establishment of a new worldwide organization or through a refreshed WIPO.
Famous quotes containing the words world, intellectual, wealth and/or organisation:
“Let us, then, take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“The first duty of government is to see that people have food, fuel, and clothes. The second, that they have means of moral and intellectual education.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)
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—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organisation upon the natural organisation of the body.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)