Recently, a Chinese delegation consisting of representatives from SIPO, the National Copyright Administration of China and the Permanent Mission of the People’s Republic of China to the United Nations Office in Geneva attends the 12th Session of the WIPO Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore (IGC) in Geneva, continuing to discuss issues like expressions of folklores, traditional knowledge and genetic resources. At the session, Lu Guoliang, Deputy Director General of the International Cooperation Department of SIPO is elected as the Vice Chairman of the IGC.

Chinese delegation participates, with constructive and responsible attitudes, appropriately expressed the same basic stance in the session as other developing countries and airs opinions on definition, protection target and scope of folklore, advantages and disadvantages of traditional knowledge database and languages in conference files, which receives supports from other developing countries.

The session also has serious discussion on the substantial issues of folklore, traditional knowledge and genetic resources and all participating countries express their own stances and viewpoints. However, as a lot of divergences still exist, no compromise has been reached, and no substantial progress is made in the discussion of the expressions of folklore, traditional knowledge and genetic resources.

Participants also discuss the future working agenda. After repeated consultations and compromises, the following consensus has been reached: Regarding the topic of expressions of folklore and traditional knowledge, the secretariat of the session, on the basis of existing working achievements, sums up the protection mechanisms and gaps in the international layer and is considering related solutions, so as to file new documents for the next session; on the topic of genetic resources, the secretariat continues to collect relative documents and comments. The next session will discuss establishing inter-session mechanism to accelerate working process and continue the discussion on substantial issues.

This is the first session after WIPO granting a new two-year term to IGC with participants including 84 countries, 18 inter-governmental organizations and 47 non-governmental organizations. Jaya Ratna, Deputy Permanent Representative of the Permanent Mission of Singapore to the United Nations Office in Geneva is elected IGC new Chairman, and Lu Guoliang, Deputy Director General of the International Cooperation Department of SIPO and a Moroccan are elected Vice Chairmen.

2008-03-31

2008-03-31