Lobbying by US business interests has shot down a proposed meeting, to be held by the Geneva-based World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) next year, to explore 'open' models of innovation.

A group of leading scientists and economists suggested the meeting in a 7 July letter to Kamil Idris, director-general of WIPO. They highlighted the explosion of various open and collaborative projects to create public goods, such as the Human Genome Project and open-source software, and said it was time for WIPO to include the approach in its deliberations.

Francis Gurry, assistant director-general and legal counsel at WIPO, told Nature at the time that the agency welcomed the idea as “a very important and interesting development”. He added that “the director-general looks forward with enthusiasm to taking up the invitation to organize a conference to explore the scope and application of these models” (see Nature 424, 118; 2003).

But Gurry's words seem to have triggered a backlash from firms that would rather see WIPO working to protect their intellectual property rights. Gurry says WIPO has since been inundated with calls from trade and consumer groups and government representatives. It is understood that lobbyists such as the Business Software Alliance, which is partly funded by Microsoft, also pressed the US state department and the US Patent and Trademark Office to have the meeting called off. US government officials have since spoken out against the idea.

“The request for an open discussion on a range of projects became transformed into a domestically, as opposed to internationally, polarized debate about just one 'project': open-source software,” says Gurry. As a result, he says, the meeting is now unlikely to take place. “The possibility of conducting a policy discussion on intellectual property of the sort appropriate for an international organization became increasingly remote,” he claims.

In the United States, the European Union and elsewhere, governments are considering measures to encourage the public procurement of open-source software, such as the Linux operating system. This is being vigorously opposed by some software companies and by the Business Software Alliance.

Economist Paul David of Stanford University in California, who signed the letter, says he is “appalled” that the meeting should be “scuttled because of the mere presence of open-source software in a list of many other forms of collaborative knowledge production”.

But Lois Boland, director of international relations for the US Patent and Trademark Office, says that open-source software is contrary to WIPO's mission to promote intellectual property rights. “To hold a meeting to disclaim or waive such rights seems to us to be contrary to the goals of WIPO,” she says.

The Washington-based Computer and Communications Industry Association, which represents small companies that support open-source software, has attacked WIPO's decision not to hold the meeting. Edward Black, president of the group, says that the association has written to Boland to complain about her comments.

Tim Hubbard, a genomicist at the Sanger Institute near Cambridge, UK, and a signatory to the letter, says he is still hopeful that the meeting may happen. “It's not the role of industries regulated by such regimes to inhibit discussion,” he argues.