I’ll be speaking on SAFM’s Morning Live After 8 Debate just after the 8am news. Turn your dial between 104-107fm to hear about Creative Commons in South Africa!
Round two for Laugh If Off and SABMiller
Laugh it Off starts second round of its battle against South African Breweries (SABMiller) today at the Supreme Court of Appeals in Bloemfontein.
Great news is that the FXI’s Simon Kimani has enlisted the legal savvy of Advocate Gilbert Marcus to argue the case that Laugh it Off’s constitutional right to freedom of speech is being obstructed by SAB’s claims of trademark and copyright infringement of its Black Label brand.
Tom Forsythe, who gained fame for being taken to court in 1999 after he used the famous Barbie doll to create a series of photographs called “Food-chain Barbie” urged LIO to ‘fight, fight, fight’ against ‘brand bullies’ like SABMiller. Forsythe won his case against Marttel when he told the court that he had decided on the series of pictures “to critique the objectification of women associated with Barbie and to lambast the conventional beauty myth and the social acceptance of women as objects because this is what Barbie embodies”.
“Our world is increasingly defined by brands,” said Forsythe. “If we hope to effectively comment on our world, we must be able to critique the brands that define that world. Humour hits home, so it’s very dangerous to the bean counters of the world.
“I hope the decision in my case will help the Supreme Court of Appeal see the important cultural benefit of allowing … citizens to critique the culture’s brand makers.”
Go here for more or click back later for more news as the case progresses.
Imagination Labs learn the tricks of their trade
I went to talk to students from the Johannesburg campus of Imagination Labs about the history of copyright and Creative Commons today.
The Imagination Labs were initiated by Café (the Communications and Advertising Forum for Empowerment) and the Vega Brand Communications School in order to help transform the creative communication industry in South Africa.
The Labs are creative hot shops that offer one-year intensive training courses to previously disadvantaged South Africans. Lab programmes guide learners through a diversity of creative explorations in fields such as design, performance, fashion, writing, music, photography, architecture and film-making. Learners are also given the opportunity to apply their skills and talents by interacting with professionals in community projects and ‘real-life’ campaigns. In community labs, such as the Alexsan Lab, the course also includes projects to retrieve and creatively document community memories that are in danger of being lost.
The students were great to talk to – really informed and enthusiastic about how they could become involved in the Creative Commons movement – and hopefully now a little wiser about the implications of their work on freedom of expression in South Africa.
Indigenous knowledge affirmation
‘Global legislation on indigenous knowledge‘ by Anju Sharma is an excellent review of global trends in the protection of indigenous knowledge. Sharma outlines developments as either defensive or positive strategies for protecting or affirming indigenous communities’ interests in developing countries.
Defensive strategies include defining indigenous systems as unpatentable, developing databases of indigenous knowledge products, or forcing companies to make public the origin of their products and agreements with the communities from which those products are derived.
Positive strategies involve educating communities as to the economic viability of the information that they hold.
The latter is really important for developing countries, and perhaps the most effective strategy in the long term. Education and awareness will result in the empowerment of communities to be able to compete in the global marketplace, rather than seeing people as victims and pawns of a global economy in which they play no part.
It is this ‘positive’ role that Creative Commons plays in the realm of international copyright law. Instead of trying to change a system which emphasises individual or corporate control over knowledge, Creative Commons uses contract law to enable individuals to cede some rights to the community from where their knowledge was derived.
There are no easy answers to these questions, and Creative Commons is by no means the only way to solve problems of global intellectual property abuse, but it is definitely the most viable temporary solution while the law catches up.
Now we must just speed up Creative Commons for patent law and we’ll be on our way to finding a global solution.
Latest from the Lion King case
Judge Daniels reserved judgement on Disney’s urgent appeal in the Pretoria High Court yesterday to void 240 trademark attachments, which would give the plaintiffs rights over the South African use of some of the company’s best-known characters if Walt Disney loses the case. Read this from the Pretoria News and more from Reuters.
Copy rights and responsibilities defining the South African public commons
- What do the Lion King, rooibos tea and southafrica.com have in common?
- Who owns Madiba’s face? Why can’t SAB just Laugh It Off?
- Why are films like _The Mielie Kids_ (1917) and _Sarie Marais_ (1931) so important?
- What exactly is indigenous knowledge and how do we protect it?
Growing increasingly broad in recent years, copyright has come to determine what music we listen to, what we write on our T-shirts, how rich or how poor we are and what we remember in the information age. Because data is the most valued resource in the new economy, the ownership of that data has become the source of a new battleground to determine at what rate communities are able to innovate and develop in the information age.
Drawing inspiration from the Free Software Movement, Creative Commons was launched in 2001 to provide an alternative to the default copyright rules that govern music, film, books and images. By acknowledging the “copy responsibilities” that informed copyright’s origin in eighteenth century Europe, Creative Commons uses simple copyright contracts to develop new forms of communal ownership.
South Africa, often at the front line of battles around global copyright has a unique and timely opportunity to lead with intellectual property rights innovations such as those proposed by Creative Commons. It is unclear who will win the battle over whether there will be more copy rights than responsibilities in the information age, but what is clear is that business, communities, NGOs and government cannot afford to remain ignorant about copyright and its effects.
Join Heather Ford, public lead for Creative Commons South Africa, to discuss the impact of copyright on the future of the South African public commons.
Tuesday, 31 August: 5:30 – 7:00pm: School of Law, University of the Witwatersrand, LB 144 (follow signs from ground floor of Law Building, West Campus)
To RSVP, please contact Heather Ford, heather@creativecommons.org or Jonathan Klaaren, Klaarenje@law.wits.ac.za
Invitation to a Creative Commons South Africa Event
Weblog- Behance Network Creative Roundup
- Preparing Your Educational Resources for DiscoverEd
- Canonical Wants to Double Your Donation!
- Polish Ministry Creates Incentives for Sharing
- Printing Thom Yorke’s Head
- Jamendo PRO Partners with International Hotel & Restaurant Association
- Commoner Letter #3: Jay Yoon of CC Korea
- CC Taiwan Launches Version 3.0
- ccMixter→ArtisTech Media
- Free Software Award nominations due October 31
