In its latest efforts to promote the importance of intellectual property rights (IPR), the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) recently awarded the King of Thailand HM Bhumibol Adulyadej, an avid artist and an inventor with over 20 patents and 19 trademarks – its new “WIPO Global Leaders Award”. This award is intended to recognize world leaders who promote IPR in their sphere of influence at national and international levels.
Ironically, Thailand, a country of 60 million people with a per capita income of $8,300 USD, has been marked as a serious offender of IPR because of piracy and copyright infringement. Piracy accounts for a high percentage of the Thai market for movies, music (approx. 50%), software (approx. 80%), and books, most of which are produced in developed countries. The country has been targeted by IIPA’s Priority Watch List for 2007 (see my post on IIPA’s Special 301 report).
The Global Leaders Award may now increase pressure on Thailand to comply with WIPO rules, starting right from the top with the King.
If you happen to be in Delhi next weekend on February 24-25, come and visit Envisage’07, the annual inter-collegiate open source technical festival organized by the students and faculty of the Institute of Informatics and Communications (IIC), University of Delhi. A range of competitive challenges, both technical and non-technical will be held. The event is FREE – so stop by and encourage the engineering students and faculty of IIC and participating teams from all over the country. For more information check out 
I always feel that Pune has a special buzz especially when it has to do with open source. Students from many colleges and developers from local IT companies such as Infosys, Red Hat, Persistent, Thoughtworks, Celunite all join in to make GNUnify successful. The Pune LUG is also refreshingly participatory and conducts very successful install fests!
Joichi Ito (chairman of Creative Commons) and Catharina Maracke (international legal advisor for Creative Commons) led the inauguration. Joi was awesome. He talked about his interaction with media companies and governments who are on the DRM bandwagon and how technologies including open source software were key in a paradigm shift towards more choice for creators and consumers of music, movies, and knowledge. Dr. Phatak expressed his interest in promoting the CC licenses for content. He felt these licenses are a better fit for knowledge than some software oriented licenses.