Dear Colleague:

The following open letter will be sent to WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization, calling for TRANSPARENCY, PARTICIPATION, BALANCE and ACCESS in its work. Prior to a large and ambitious publicity campaign, your sign-on to this letter is essential.

WIPO is locking NGOs out of its negotiations, using tactics to isolate those governments who stand up for you, and hiding the evidence by deleting it from their website. The mentioned letter goes into great detail on this.

If you are a computer programmer or polititian; if you are ill, if you have an audio/visual or motor impairment, if you are a student, academic, or citizen concerned about access to knowledge and the absence of balance between rightsholders and the public interest within developed countries and mainly in developing/least developed countries, please take a moment to read this and consider signing into it.

Things you can do:

1. sign onto the open letter (now available in English and Portuguese) by visiting this link: http://www.petitiononline.com/wipo/petition.html, and
2. spread it all over the world by sending e-mails and putting in your webpage a link to the online petition.

Gandhi said, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you WIN." This is the fighting part, and your help is essential.

Pedro de Paranaguá Moniz
Brazilian citizen
Post-graduate student at Queen Mary, University of London
lc04013@qmul.ac.uk

Cory Doctorow
Canadian citizen
European Affairs Coordinator, Electronic Frontier Foundation
cory@eff.org
www.eff.org

Pedro Antonio Dourado de Rezende
Brazilian citizen
Professor of Computing Science
University of Brasilia (UnB), Brazil
prezende@unb.br
http://www.cic.unb.br/docentes/pedro/sd.htm