The Access to Knowledge (A2K) movement is a loose collection of civil society groups, governments, and individuals converging on the idea that access to knowledge should be linked to fundamental principles of justice, freedom, and economic development.
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The goals of Access to Knowledge are embodied in a draft treaty, emerging from a call from Brazil and Argentina for a development agenda for the World Intellectual Property Organization.[1] The treaty is intended to ease the transfer of knowledge to developing nations, and to secure the viability of open innovation systems all over the world.[2]
Access to knowledge and science is protected by Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The article balances the right of access with a right to protection of moral and material interests:
Article 27 Everyone 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.
Everyone 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.
A2K academics argue that “material interests” are not simply equivalent to current intellectual property provisions, not least because these rights are saleable and transferable, and therefore not “inalienable”. The right to access is ultimately the more important part of the right. Current levels of IP protection seem out of balance with Article 27, according to A2K theorists:
“... in a very real sense, rights delayed are rights denied. Had access to oral rehydration therapy and second-generation vaccine technologies been delayed for twenty years ... three million children would have died. Even for less life- and-death technologies, a twenty-year delay works an immense limitation on enjoyment of the right. For cultural works, the situation is even worse; protection lasts longer than a human lifetime.”[3]
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