Dr Francis Gurry

Director General World Intellectual Property Organisation

August 4, 2009

A global perspective on the challenges facing copyright in the digital age

 A global perspective on the challenges facing copyright in the digital age.

Copyright provides a market-based mechanism for distributing value for cultural works to creators and their business associates.  The migration of the expression of cultural content to digital technology and the means of distributing content to the Internet is provoking market failure.  Some 40 billion files of music were illegally shared on the Internet in 2008.  Films are increasingly available on file-sharing networks as bandwidth expands.  E-books are becoming more attractive to consumers.  The news industry is experimenting with different business models.  How is copyright coping with the changed environment?  

Francis Gurry, a national of Australia, is Director General the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva.  He currently serves as the most senior Australian within the UN structure, and is only the third Australian to head a UN agency.

The Australian Government provided strong support to Dr Gurry’s election campaign to the position of Director General of WIPO.
 
Francis Gurry began his WIPO career in 1985.   He was instrumental in establishing the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center in 1994 and subsequently in developing the highly successful Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy.  He served on the WIPO top management team from 1997, initially as Assistant Director General, then from 2003 as Deputy Director General with responsibility for patents and the international Patent Cooperation Treaty system, the Arbitration and Mediation Center, traditional knowledge, traditional cultural expressions and genetic resources.


Before joining WIPO, Francis Gurry practiced as an attorney in Australia, and taught law at the University of Melbourne, Australia.  He holds law degrees from the University of Melbourne and a Ph.D from the University of Cambridge, UK. He is the author of numerous publications and articles on intellectual property issues in international journals.