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Recently Facebook and Twitter revealed they had removed a network of accounts linked to the Iranian government that attempted to launch online Disinformation campaign. Microsoft said it seized 99 websites used by Iranian hackers to steal sensitive information and launch other cyber attacks. The company said the group, which it has been tracking since 2013, has tried to snoop on activists, journalists, political dissidents, defense industry workers and others in the Middle East, including some who were “protesting oppressive regimes” in the region. Hackers did so by tricking people in those organizations to click on malicious links disguised to resemble...

It was mid-May, about six weeks after Trump appointee Mari Stull began her new job as senior adviser at the State Department’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs. As senior adviser at the bureau, Stull was in charge of making sure President Trump’s agenda was represented at the many international organizations the U.S. participates in and mostly funds, such as the United Nations and its various agencies. Stull and her boss, Amb. Kevin Moley, had just left for a trip to Geneva for the World Health Assembly. Back at the State Department, Erin Barclay, a senior career diplomat at the IO...

A United Nations agency has supplied computers and technology to Iran and North Korea. Two U.N. agencies are involved, WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization), of which the U.S. is a member, and UN Development Program (UNDP), which has already been documented as aiding rogue regimes. Both Iran and North Korea are under U.S. and U.N. sanctions. Note in the Fox article below, that the sanctions "run-around" happened out of the organization's Beijing office (both Russia and China have refused to cooperate with the full slate of sanctions required to stop Iran's nuclear program). The broadening inquiry raises new concerns about...

The U.S. State Department is investigating the shipment of computers and other sophisticated equipment to North Korea and Iran by way of an obscure United Nations agency, despite ongoing U.N. and U.S. sanctions against both governments aimed at blocking their development of nuclear weapons. The broadening inquiry raises new concerns about the ways in which U.N. agencies have managed to sidestep restrictions that the world body expects the rest of the world to obey in halting the spread of sensitive technologies to nuclear-ambitious pariah regimes. It also calls into question how much U.N. member states know about the activities of...

This story is almost too crazy to believe. WIPO, the UN agency that more or less acts as the global IP maximalist agenda-setter, is now being accused of defying UN sanctions, by shipping computers and servers to North Korea. In what appears to be an attempt to avoid scrutiny over this very questionable transfer, WIPO tried to route everything through someone in China. The payment, however, was halted by Bank of America, who quickly realized that delivering computers to North Korea almost certainly violated sanctions against supplying technology to the country. So why is WIPO giving computers to the North...

While authors have the right to be recognised and rewarded for their work, the purpose of intellectual property protection is the "promotion of literary, scientific or artistic production and ... inventive activity for the sake of the common good", Vatican officials said. A delegation of the Holy See told a gathering of the World Intellectual Property Organisation that Pope Benedict is troubled by the "excessive zeal" with which rich countries have been protecting their intellectual property rights, especially when it comes to health care in developing countries, reports the ZeroPaid website. "On the part of rich countries there is excessive...

I don't know if you've ever seen the Did Glenn Beck Rape and Murder a Young Girl in 1990 website, but it's fairly amusing. It's a political satire of the style of argument Glenn Beck likes to engage in, which involves requiring that someone prove a negative ("prove you didn't do X") and making claims in the form of an interrogative ("Hey, I'm just asking questions here. I'm not saying he did this. What's wrong with asking questions?"). Well now Beck is trying to kill the site by making a formal complaint (PDF) to an international internet governing body, the...

An international agreement against climate change could hinge around steps to ease the transfer of green technology to developing countries, a Brazilian official said on Monday. His comments at a World Intellectual Property Organisation conference came amid signs of a rift between rich and poor nations over the best approach to take on patented technology that can be used to tackle global warming. "The key message is that a fair agreement on technology transfer is crucial to seal the deal in Copenhagen," said Haraldo de Oliviera Machado Filho, a senior advisor in Brazil's government committee on climate change. He said...

A coalition of consumer groups and corporations that includes everyone from IP Justice to AT&T has just issued a statement calling on the US WIPO delegation to opppose WIPO's proposed Broadcast Treaty in its current form. In the letter, the groups worry that the treaty's support for worldwide legal rules regulating any device that can decrypt video signals "would presumably require wholesale regulation of general purpose computers and other devices, and have significant harmful consequences for the technology industry generally." We've taken a detailed look at the treaty before, but let's refresh our collective memories. The Broadcast Treaty has been...

GENEVA - Most Americans have probably never heard of the World Intellectual Property Organization, headquartered here in Switzerland. Intellectual property is intangible property, such as software or music. Its value is very real. According to a study by Leonard Nakamura, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, the total value of intellectual property in the United States is more than $5 trillion. That's more than a third of the value of the U.S. stock markets. Protected only by copyrights and patents, it is relatively easy to steal or counterfeit. (snip) WIPO and other international bodies are meeting to...

Intellectual property, once a dry, technical subject, has been cast as the villain in a modern day struggle between darkness and light. Free Culture and open source advocates argue passionately that intellectual property rights harm us all by locking up knowledge and culture. Their protests are loudest in the U.S. and E.U., but the most consequential front in this burgeoning ideological war over intellectual property rights is the developing world. Intellectual property critics say the World Intellectual Property Organization ("WIPO") needs to abandon its pro-IP orientation to help the developing world. Until now, WIPO's job has been to promote intellectual...

US seeks probe of bribery allegations at UN agency By Frances Williams in Geneva Published: April 29 2005 20:31 | Last updated: April 29 2005 20:31 The US has called for a full investigation by the World Intellectual Property Organisation into allegations of bribery concerning the award of a SFr70m contract for a building renovation project. The allegations, which are being examined by a Geneva judge, centre on Michael Wilson, a Ghanaian businessman and former vice-president of Cotecna, the Swiss-based inspection company implicated in the United Nations oil-for-food scandal. The case is the latest controversy to blight the UN after...

The International Telecommunication Union is one of the most venerable of bureaucracies. Created in 1865 to facilitate telegraph transmissions, its mandate has expanded to include radio and telephone communications. But the ITU enjoys virtually no influence over the Internet. That remains the province of specialized organizations such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN; the Internet Engineering Task Force; the World Wide Web Consortium; and regional address registries. The ITU, a United Nations agency, would like to change that. "The whole world is looking for a better solution for Internet governance, unwilling to maintain the current...

Treaty casts shadow on public domain Concerns have been raised over the world's first Webcasting treaty before its ink is even dry A United Nations committee on Wednesday approved the world's first Webcasting treaty, which has drawn criticism that it limits the use of works that are in the public domain. At a meeting in Geneva, the World Intellectual Property Organisation's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights agreed to prepare a draft of the treaty by 1 April, 2004. A second meeting is scheduled for June, followed by an expected diplomatic conference during which nations that are members of...