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Today is designated “Intellectual Property Day” although its not clear who did the designating or what they hoped to achieve by the exercise.

My analysis of the takedown of fair use parodies using clips from Hitler movie Downfall is now live on memeburn.

The Intellectual Property Laws Amendment Bill, known informally as the TK Bill is was introduced into Parliament in February and will be before Parliament in May.

Geolocation is all the buzz, at least in early adopter geek circles. Most smart phones now have global positioning system capability, so that the phone can determine your geographic position. Geolocation apps such as Foursquare use gps capability to enable users to signal a user’s location.CIO explains in the detail in Geolocation 101.

We live in a world where we readily accept that we and other people can act and communicate across contents. We rely on others seeing, hearing and reading our communications when all we have in front of us is a screen. We’ve developed  commons sense about when to believe what machines tell us and when not to. We disregard the email from “Mary Smith” telling us that we won the” UK Lottery” but accord some trust to the email purporting to come from someone we’ve met once.

It would be unwise for South Africa to undertake international legal obligations to prohibit circumvention technologies.

My article on why South Africa shouldn’t ratify the WIPO Performers and Phongrams Treaty has been published by TechCentral.

Readers of this blog will recall how I asked for comments and then recounted progress on the pilot for the course on p2pu which ran last year.

I’ve blogged about p2pu before, the online volunteer driven learning community that serves as a social wrapper for open educational resources.

A recent decision by the United Kingdom Information Tribunal is the trigger point for renewed claims that universities are commercial entities.

Mark Surman, my friend and colleague, who heads up Mozilla.org is beating the drum for openess with a project called Drumbeat. Most people know Mozilla as the host for the community that co-produced the open browser Firefox. Firefox currently accounts for approximately 25% of the web browsers in use. More importantly Firefox is free software, free for anyone to copy, modify, improve and share. While there are other free browers such as Opera and Google’s Chrome for many years it was Firefox which provided the standards complaint alternative to various non standards compliant versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. With Firefox use on the rise Drumbeat is intended to ensure support an open Internet in other areas, the projects long term vision is “make sure the internet is still open, participatory, decentralized and public 100 years from now”. Focus in the first year of Drumbeat is on concrete projects to bootstrap the creation of a community: visualising the Web and assembling an Open Webskills course at P2PU. As fascinating as these are what is more intriguing is the way in which Mark, and Mozilla are using the social processes which helped create great free and open source projects like Firefox as a way of generating not just more open projects but ideas about openness.

Yesterday, the 1st of January 2010, was the day on which new works entered the public domain, at least in South Africa.

Tweeting from a conference, workshop or other process, e.g. the WIPO Copyright Committee can be a useful way of informing a wider network what is happening in the event. But it can be more, it can involve a conversation between those who are physically present and those who are not. I have some ideas how to make these conversations more engaging for those not physically present.

In a few months I’ll be completing a three year fellowship at the Shuttleworth Foundation. What has it all been about?

When the World Intellectual Property Organisation Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights will from 14 to 18 December 2009 a possible treaty on exceptions and limitations to copyright for visually impaired persons will be on the agenda.

On Monday Berlin celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall, 20 years ago.
Since Tuesday I’ve been participating (there is no way one just attends something like this) in a p2pu workshop in Berlin.

A participants feedback on the Copyright for Educators Course:

Its commonplace for South Africans who visit San Francisco to be told that it resembles Cape Town. Since I lived in San Francisco first and now live in Cape Town I can confirm that Cape Town resembles San Francisco. At least it resembles San Francisco in some respects; both have locations of incredible natural beauty, both are favoured tourist destinations with storied histories, and both are magnets for a wide variety of artists, techies and unusual and colourful characters. There are certainly just as many differences, Cape Town has embarrassingly poor bandwidth, breathtakingly poor road planning, a paucity of public transport and a surfeit of crime.

Ovid speaks of the Roman games as a place were people go to see, and be seen. There seems to be a very human tendency to want to know about others, and also to present a public presence.

There was a time when Non Disclosure Agreements (NDA’s) were considered a mark of the cognoscenti but now their popularity is waning as the perception of their utility plummets.

The Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research and Development Act 2008 has caused some confusion amongst educators. Some people have suggested that this Act applies to all intellectual property which could be regarded as publicly financed. Some go even further and claim that any creation by someone employed at a government supported school or university is covered by the Act.

Some time ago I asked for suggestions for an on-line course on the practicalities of the Knowledge Commons. Due in part to the feedback that has become a course on Copyright for Educators.

The final Report of the South African Open Copyright Review is online.

The Australian Productivity Commission recommends abolishing the prohibition on parallel import .

A Harvard Professor of Law and Economics, Prof Stephen Shavell argues that proponents of open access leave copyright law essentially unchanged.
Instead he argues that it would be more efficient to simply abolish copyright in academic work altogether since academics do not benefit from copyright. Instead academics will continue to benefit as they already do, from gains in status as a result of their work.

There is further critical discussion of the scheme at Wits Knowledge and Information Management.

What is rent seeking? Using the non market processes such as the political process to obtain a monopoly. Rent seeking is a term of art in economics. The Economist explains the term

Recent news reports point to an instance in which piracy has delayed the access of  Africans to the global knowledge economy. ITNews Africa reports:

“Levels of piracy are cripplingly high across the continent…” (Policy Network.net)

Implementing the World Intellectual Property Agendais now available at IDRC’s Open Books.

Creative Commons South Africa (CC Za) is now hosted at Intellectual Property Law Research, at the Department of Private Law at the University of Cape Town Law School. Tobias Schonwetter, a post doctoral fellow at Intellectual Property Law Research, has taken over as legal lead from yours truly. Tobias will join public lead Dave Duarte, in steering the project.

Expect exciting developments soon, a new website (already in beta) and a new version (CC Za 3.0) of the licences. Its a great experience for me to watch something which I have helped create grow as new people take it on. Since this is my blog I am going to indulge in a little retrospective on the history of CC Za up to this point.

Last week, Friday and Saturday (29-30 May) I had a chance to participate in a conference on Philosophy and Intellectual Property.

bioethics.net reports that Merck publishes a phony journal that allows Big Pharma to make claims about their products which appear to be peer reviewed science, but aren’t.

Scott Nelson has written an insightful article ‘Attribution Lacking‘ on plagiarism, more especially his experience of plagiarism.

Yesterday I listed 12 topics that could/should be covered in an open course on copyright, licences and OER’s for education. Please add the issues you’d like to see addressed by commenting on that post.

I am currently putting together a course (all the resources will be open) intended to enable open educators, formal, informal, university and school, to navigate the complexities of copyright law and licensing on educational resources.

The African Commons Project has launched a campaign to stop and the regulations proposed control research under the Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research Act.

A number of organisations have received communication from the Department of Science and Technology advising that the period for comment on the draft regulations to be made in terms of section 17 of the Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research Act has been briefly extended to 29 May 2009. A government notice is expected to be published shortly.

Legal Brief has a brief on the unconstitutionality of the proposed regulations to be made ito of the Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research Act, linking back to my post made on Monday.

Yesterday I explained how the proposed regulations for the Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research are unconstitutional. This post examines the confusion between two distinct concepts, ‘the public domain’ and ‘open source’ aka ‘the commons’.

Draft Regulations intended to be approved by the Minister of Science and Technology have been published for comment. The proposed regulations are available at Parliamentary Monitoring Group site.
(PMG does a great job of making important government documents available to the public via the Internet).

A coalition alliance of organisations have launched a call for a comprehensive national broadband strategy which will ensure that ‘all South Africans have affordable broadband access to the Internet’.

In a previous post I linked to the 2nd round of “noncommercial” study questionnaire from Creative Commons.

Creative Commons has announced today that it is ‘launching the second and final round of a survey intended to collect information on how people understand the term “noncommercial use”.’

Claims that the NPA statement on the decision to withdraw the prosecution against Mr Jacob Zuma shows why it is important for democracy for the judgements of courts to be freely available to all on the Internet.

La Quadrature du Net reports that the French National Assembly has rejected a draconian draft law sought by corporations whose business models are threatened by the Internet. La Quadrature explains:

Protest in New Zealand including the internet blackout forces scrapping of draconian law, for the meantime. A few weeks ago I blogged about the internet blackout, a protest at a proposed ammendment to New Zealand law: “Thousands of websites in New Zealand have blacked themselves out today to protest the imposition of a law which requires Internet Services Providers to disconnect subscribers who are accused of copyright infringement, regardless of proof.”

Its unfortunate that the phrase sounds like an oxymoron; “intellectual property for development”. Although intellectual property statutes have their ancestry in the privileges and letters patent granted to royal favourites in the middle ages, legislatures have tried to re-purpose the monopolies to create incentives for innovation.
That the intellectual property system has failed the developing world is attested by every person who dies for want of patented drugs, every child who cannot afford books for her education, every dollar that is paid from the poorest countries in the world to information intermediaries in the richest.

A story with a happy ending, reading the update at the end.

During September 2008 Aslam Rafjee, as chair of the South African government OSS and Open Standards Working Group , started a campaign against digital apartheid, discrimination by government websites based on the type of browsers which people use. Now the campaign has caught on in Brazil.

Science fiction stories often ask their readers to willingly suspend disbelief and imagine a parallel universe, one just like the one which readers inhabit, except for one or two minor details. Imagine, the story goes that a human develops an ability to know what others are thinking.

In the wake of the Facebook terms of use episode many people are aware, or reawakened to the importance of on-line smarts when it comes to legal issues of social networking sites.

Old and a new media have been enjoying the gefuffle over the last few weeks as Facebook imposed new terms of use and then reverted to its previous conditions while it tries to respond to outcry by users. Paul Jacobson followed developments closely at WebtehLaw

Thousands of websites in New Zealand have blacked themselves out today to protest the imposition of a law which requires Internet Services Providers to disconnect subscribers who are accused of copyright infringement, regardless of proof. The protest is being organised by Creative Freedom Foundation NZ to protest an new law in New Zealand:

Steve Song had a great week blogging last week, with a great suggestion how to make communications more affordable for the the poorest across Africa. But sadly that story will have to wait, because Steve also posted on how:

What do we mean by open?

I use the term all the time; open licence, open access, open education, and open standard. In each of these contexts its considered to be a good thing. But is open always good?

In a previous post Eyes on the Prize I said that I would elaborate on some of the reasons why innovation prizes are better than patents for African universities.

Prizes not patents are best way for African universities to innovate, get money and demonstrate excellence.

An invitation from Creative Commons to take part in an online focus group on NonCommercial.
Please consider participating especially if you are an African creator.

There are already two intellectual property associations in Africa, the Anglophone ARIPO, and Francophone OAPI, but there is talk of allocating resources to a third organisation, to be titled the Pan-African Intellectual Property Organisation.

ICASA has published a draft code of conduct for broadcasters. The primary focus of the code is on limiting sexual and violent content which children might be exposed to through broadcasts (radio and television). The code tends to use the similar language and phrases to the Film and Publications Act.

The Intellectual Property from Publicly Financed Research Bill was signed into law yesterday.

The judgement handed down by the Supreme Court of Appeal today in the appeal of National Director of Public Prosecutions v Zuma is up on the Southern African Legal Information Institute site.

Despite massively expensive bandwidth costs, and uncompetitive Internet penetration, new media are changing the way that news is communicated in South Africa.

I blogged about two unfortunate students from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the appropriation of their efforts to help people in the developing world. How would a similar scenario play out in South Africa.

The New York Times has a story entitled “Who owns your great idea”. The article contains a glaring error and an bizarre omission.

I’ve discovered an article warning about the patent bubble back in 2005. The article quotes an even earlier question raised by Alan Greenspan, at the time chairman of the Federal Reserve raised the question in a speech at Stanford University in February 2004: “Are [patent] protections so vague that they produce uncertainties that raise risk premiums and the cost of capital?”

Back in September 2008 Brian Kahin wrote on The Patent Bubble in the Huffington Post.

The last two posts on the recent Altech rulings referred to “network” licences. I used the phrase to avoid the cumbersome Electronic Communications Network Service licence of the Electronic Communications Act, the legislation which governs telecommunications (and broadcasting), which has another category of licence, an Electronic Communication Service licence.

The judgement deals with leave to appeal.

After two days of hearings the Pretoria High Court has rejected the application by the Minister of Communications to delay the effect of its previous ruling; that holders of VANS licences are entitled to network licences. The news has been greated with great excitement at MyBroadband.

How should telemarketing be regulated? Should telemarketing be banned?
Should telemarketers be allowed to cold call strangers or should people have had to opt in to receive calls.

The Fundação Getulio Vargas and the Yale Internet and Society Project have just released a remarkable first, the publication of Access to Knowledge in Brazil an open licensed book on access to knowledge in Brazil. The book examines open business, exceptions and limitations to copyright in Brazil, how to promote innovation in biotechnology in Brazil, and access to medicines.

At the A2K3 conference Dr Leslie Chan of U Toronto has reminded us all that “impact factors” assessed in dollars are a bizarre way to think about the value of research, whereas both truth and development might be regarded as better ways of valuing research.

We all know its a big problem in South Africa. Hijacking, theft, even murder by book gangs who make millions re-selling blood novels. That is why South African authorities have added “books” to the list of second hand goods subject to stringent regulation intended to prevent the sale of stolen goods.

I am at the A2K3 conference in Geneva, Switzerland not far from CERN where earlier today the LHC, the large Hadron collider, was scheduled for start up.

The latest version of the Film and Publications Ammendment Bill which was revised by the Home Affairs Portfolio Committee still contains unconstitutional provisions.

Strategy Safari, a Guided Tour through the Wilds of Strategic Management by Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel

Last week, the Open Education Track (or Tribe) at the iCommons iSummit, held in Sapporo, Japan, came up with the idea of a logo or mark to indicate open educational resources. The term we used in that discussion was “certification mark” but we might equally well refer to a “device”, a term used in heraldry to refer to a multi coloured emblem or logo , but which can also refer to the software which can produce and accompany a logo. In this post I’ll record our discussion at the iSummit, then I’ll share some of my thoughts in a subsequent post.

The appearance of ‘Friction over Fan Fiction‘ an article in the July/August 08 of the Literary Review of Canada signals a new, mainstream concern with a burgeoning phenomenon. It also, without intending to, raises to important arguements for limitations to copyright which explicitly set out that fan fiction is permitted. I say burgeoning because according to the article; “a Google search of ‘fan fiction’ brings up over 26 million hits”.

In a previous post, the Traditions of Knowledge, I referred to the appropriation of traditional knowledge by means of industrial revolution intellectual property.

Conventional intellectual property laws claim to confer rights only on knowledge that is individually authored, reduced to material form and ‘original’. The antithesis of that modern knowledge paradigm is traditional knowledge which is by its nature traditional, communal and frequently oral. Some developing countries have adopted sui generis legislation that attempts to craft a regime appropriate for traditional knowledge. But if appropriation is carried out mostly by corporations head-quartered in developed countries, and appropriated knowledge is exploited in developed countries through the mechanisms of conventional intellectual property the sui generis legislation in the country of origin won’t work. This is exactly what seems to be going on.Developing nations including South Africa have advocated strongly for recognition of sui generis traditional knowledge rights in the global trade system through the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and World Intellectual Property Organisation. Developed country trade reps put the kibosh on this idea during the Doha round.

Globalisation and Its Discontents has a far better description of globalisation than the World is Flat, which I have previously reviewed. This even though the book is primarily concerned with global financial governance, the IMF and the World Bank, and how they behave, especially in the developing world. Stiglitz contends that IMF’ policies have attempted to serve Wall Street have failed not only developing countries but the global economy and so the United States. The explanations of the economics is clear, and easy to follow. This is all the more remarkable since Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize winning economist, rather than a journalist or trade author.

A putative bill which creates a system require patenting of tax payer funded research will be published today.

A putative bill which creates a system require patenting of tax payer funded research will be published today.

Anyone living in a consumer society is likely to benefit from reading this book, finding it an insightful if disturbing expose of manipulation techniques employed by marketers, media and politicians. You will never trust a salesman again.

Anyone living in a consumer society is likely to benefit from reading this book, finding it an insightful if disturbing expose of manipulation techniques employed by marketers, media and politicians. You will never trust a salesman again.

According to a press release the International Standards Organisation has suspended publication of OOXML as an ISO standard during the appeal process.

According to a press release the International Standards Organisation has suspended publication of OOXML as an ISO standard during the appeal process.

I have been hearing a lot lately about ACTA, a treaty which is being drafted at the behest of a handful of old economy monopolies. IPJustice has a useful anaylsis. ACTA is an accroym for Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Who could be against measures to prevent counterfieting? No doubt the name was chosen for exactly that reason, to imply that anyone who wishes to debate the provisions or even the necessity for the agreement. Its also sold as a trade agreement, which in some of the countries taking part in negociations means that executive sign-off is suffecient to bind that country, and the treaty need not pass scrutiny by the legislature.

I have recently returned from Uganda. From 27 to 29 May 2008 I participated in the PALM Africa Workshop on alternative publishing models in Africa, which was hosted by the National Book Trust of Uganda (NABOTU). The participants in the workshop represented a wide range of types of organisations, including public and private sector publishers, and an equally wide range of competences, and attitudes toward alternative publishing models. The organisers of the workshop are to be congratulated on patiently and persistently explaining the potential benefits of alternative licensing. Experimenting with alternative publishing models offers a low cost, low risk way of testing the opportunities available to developing country publishers.

I am in Kampala at a workshop hosted by the National Book Trust of Uganda on alternative publishing models, PALM Africa. The air is full of new ideas, emerging business models…change.
There is considerable promise that local publishers will be able to find new sources of sustainability and increase access to knowledge. These are important benefits of open access publishing models. There is another, often overlooked benefit of open access publishing models.

Here is the full text of the South African Appeal iro the ISO OOXML process.

“Appeal from the South African national body regarding the outcome of the fast-track processing of DIS 29500 Office open XML

In the midst of grim and troubling news about outbreaks of violence against Zimbabweans and Mozambicans, there is a good reason to be proud of being South African today.

In many countries a basic monthly telephone subscription entitles the subscriber to free local calls. In other words, a subscriber pays a flat fee, and can make any number of phone calls within that area without paying any additional amount.

Microsoft has announced that it intends future versions of Office to support Open Document Format, the international open XML document format used by other developers.

Mark Surman has written about an interesting new business model: Noank. You have to read his post to understand this one.

The Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Science and Technology, (National Assembly), will receive a briefing by the Department of Science and Technology on the Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research Bill (IPR Bill)], Venue to be confirmed, 10:00, Tuesday 3 June, 2008.

Every year the Constitution of South Africa requires that the provisions of the constitution should be reviewed. A parliamentary committee reviews the provisions of the constitution. This year an invitation for public submissions (details below) has been sent out, submissions due by the end of May.

The most populous countries in the world have rejected the OOXML as an international standard but its been pushed through anyway. China, India, Brazil and South Africa have all firmly rejected OOXML as an international standard, in a re-visit of the voting process which took place during September 2007.
Although ISO has yet to officially release the result, early reports suggest that extensive lobbying has engineered a vote change in a sufficiently large number of countries so that the specification will be pushed through.

Microsoft’s well publicised release of its “Citizen Service Platform” claims to introduce easy e-government. The basis of that claim is the use “templates”.