Jo’burg workshop helps iron out ccSA licence
Friday’s workshop was an enormous success in gathering together leading figures in South Africa’s intellectual property sphere to help draft the local Creative Commons licence.
Anriette Esterhuysen, Executive Director of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) welcomed participants to the event, noting the centrality of intellectual property rights to international ICT policy debates, such as those evolving at the World Summit on the Information Society. Esterhuysen said that publicly-funded information (such as scientific research and university resources) should be in the public domain, but that this was being hotly contested by rights holders and that this was an area that needed much greater lobbying by civil society.
Heather Ford, public lead for Creative Commons in South Africa, explained that the Creative Commons copyright licence relies on copyright law for enforcement, and that it allows authors to cede some of the bundle of rights that are automatically granted to them under default copyright rules. She explained how collaborative publishing on the internet is reminding us how all culture is derivative and that we need to re-establish the balance between private and public rights in developing more sustainable copyright policies. Ford went on to explain how Creative Commons copyright licences work in harmony with copyright law, announcing to users how they may interact with the work and what are the conditions of re-use.
Professor Coenraad Visser, Head of the Law School at Unisa, spoke about the general trend towards strengthening rights holders at the expense of balancing these private rights with the public’s right to access information after limited terms. Professor Visser discussed growing restrictions for librarians and researchers, how information is being locked up in databases, and a general “creeping overreach” of intellectual property rights in South Africa and around the world.
Andrew Rens, legal lead for ccSA, took participants through the full legal code of the licence, as legal scholars from Unisa, rights holder representatives and civil society debated and reached consensus on how the licence should be adapted.
‘This is a great way of drafting a licence,’ said Rens. ‘Lawyers very rarely have the opportunity to collaborate like this – its great to get such detailed response from some of the leading figures in South African intellectual property law.’
The workshop was so successful that the APC has decided to conduct another workshop in Cape Town, in collaboration with Bridges.org next week Tuesday (15 March). Rens is busy adapting the first draft of the licence to incorporate comments made by participants. The second draft will be available here soon.