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A group of Non-Governmental Organisations led by the Consumer Project on Technology (CPTech) successfully lobbied WIPO in its 'Geneva Declaration', resulting in a 'development agenda' that includes alternatives such as the GPL.

CPTech's director, James Love, said: 'For years, WIPO has pushed to expand the scope and level of intellectual property rights and told developing countries that this would help their development. Today WIPO supported an entirely different approach, which emphasized open source software, public domain goods like the human genome, patent exceptions for access to medicine, the control of anticompetitive practices, and other measures that have been ignored by WIPO for years. It represents a change in culture and a change in direction for WIPO. Many in the WIPO Secretariat opposed this, and few thought it would prevail, but today we are moving forward, on a different footing and in a positive direction,

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and WIPO will never be the same.'

The group had also spent some time documenting WIPO meetings in order for the public to be better informed of the trademark, copyright, and patent policies being adopted that affect their every day lives.

Cory Doctorow, Electronic Frontier Foundation's European Affairs Coordinator, said: 'The growing presence of non-governmental pressure organizations like CPTech and EFF at WIPO's meetings has begun to take its toll. The ridiculous IP-at-any-cost position of WIPO has been laid bare and revealed for a sham. Now the organization is taking its first baby-steps towards balance. In the coming months and years, the nonprofit presence at WIPO will broaden and deepen - we won't let them fool us any longer.'

The Geneva Declaration urged: 'We are witnessing ... hundreds of innovative collaborative efforts to create public goods, including the Internet, the World Wide Web, Wikipedia, the Creative Commons, GNU Linux and other free and open software projects, as well as distance education tools and medical research tools. ... Alternative compensation systems have been proposed to expand access and interest in cultural works, while providing both artists and consumers with efficient and fair systems for compensation. There is renewed interest in compensatory liability rules, innovation prizes, or competitive intermediators, as models for economic incentives for science and technology that can facilitate sequential follow-on innovation and avoid monopolist abuses.'