‘Imagine a world where absolutely everything is owned – and sold to those who can afford it. Every person would be a market. There would be nothing freely available in the public domain. Knowledge and culture could only be learnt if you paid for it.’
Guy Berger has written a great article on a session at the World Summit on the Information Society predicting a society where the commodification of knowledge has reached the extreme.
Ever been in a space shuttle or hung out at an internet café?
Well, now’s your chance. Buckle your seatbelts, because the learningcommons team, in partnership with the Shuttleworth Foundation, has created a vivid, exciting multimedia curriculum pilot project for grade 9 technology learners!
Entitled Copyright and left: A multimedia curriculum on copy rights and responsibilities in South Africa, this cross-platform, Flash-based materials offer a glimpse into the history of copyright, the impact of copyright and technology on local culture and indigenous knowledge, and new alternatives to copyright that enable you to freely copy and redistribute royalty-free content on the internet.
Launched this week, the learningcommons team (a collective headed up by Heather Ford, Creative Commons SA project lead) is thrilled with the response to the materials. We’ve just heard from Derek Keats of the University of the Western Cape that the materials will be used to introduce staff to the issues of open source and open content in South Africa. In addition, OpenLab has just announced that the curriculum will be incorprated into the latest edition of their EduKar product, a leading educational solution for African schools.
EduKar is the educational content solution OpenLab’s GNU/Linux platform. The DVD consists of over 70+ platform-neutral applications, tools and content including a content management solution (KEWL), Wikipedia LITE version, the Gutenberg Library LITE version, containing over 600 books, and eduCOMIX, a set of pdf comix from Strika Entertainment, covering Road Safety, teenage Issues eg HIV/AIDS, and HaiTi!, the definitive SchoolNet / OpenLab resource guide.
Go to learningcommons now to download your copy. Sarah and Dube are waiting for you!
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These statements are reflective of the geography of our lives, where places, things and cultural products are divided between what we are allowed to have and do and what we are not allowed to experience or share.
But how necessary is it to operate in this strictly dual environment that largely diminishes action and choice to two absolutes? With the Open Business Model project we are aiming to illustrate that there are more than two choices available to both creators and consumers of things, places and cultural products; that it is possible to offer ‘open content’ without having to compromise the business idea or its financial sustainability.
In South Africa, the value of open content is most readily recognized within the educational sector. Roleplayers from both the public and private sectors and civil society are involved in various projects aimed at delivering education through ICT to South African youth (and often further afield into other regions of Africa as well). The actors involved in these initiatives understand that the benefit for the project is not necessarily a financial one: the bigger spin-off is to create a sustainable society through education by equipping young people with the skills to actively contribute to South Africa’s economy.
Does this mean that financial benefit takes second place? Are stakeholders within the South African educational sector putting their social consciences above financial sustainability?
And if so, does this mean that funding agencies will have to continue funding projects for the next decade? And what of the stakeholders that choose to keep their content ‘closed’ in order to make a profit? Who are they selling content to, and are their models any more successful in the long term than ‘open content’ providers who currently rely on funding?
To begin finding out answers to the above questions, the Commons-sense programme at the LINK Centre, Wits University, has investigated some of the leading players in the educational sector to find out who provides (and distributes) open content and who operates on a commercial basis. We plotted our findings on a continuum, starting from the producers (and disseminators) of open content, moving towards a ‘closed’ environment where content is available only via subscription. Interestingly, we have found that many projects consist of a number of diverse partnerships, where some ‘closed’ commercial providers actually provide content for an open-content project, or where two partners with different focuses have found shared opportunities to create other projects. In these situations, the notions of ‘open’ and ‘financial sustainability’ become multi-layered. It is within these projects with their many facets and networks, that opportunities exist for South African entrepreneurs who wish to make business out of open content.
The Commons-sense case studies will attempt to map out the relationships amongst those who supply, create and distribute content, and hopes to tease out answers to what makes for a successful open-content project in South Africa, and where the ‘gaps’ may be that entrepreneurs and creators can fill to their advantage. Watch this space!
Research ICT Africa! has recently launched the book entitled Towards an African e-Index which documents a reseach initiative investigating both individual and household ICT access and usage in sub-Sahara Africa.
ICT Africa! encourages others to freely use the publication in their teachings and research by licensing the book under the Creative Commons South Africa Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 licence. This means that users are free to copy and ‘remix’ the material for various purposes.
Steve Esselaar, one of the senior researchers involved with the project, from the LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand, describes the reason for the choice of this licence: ‘The research needs to be properly accredited and users of the information need to recognise that the network has put a large investment into the work. The licence that most closely matches these requirements is the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0. … Also, one of the key mechanisms for disseminating the research is via the ResearchICTAfrica.net website and a licence that takes this distribution mechanism into account is vital.’
The high-gloss publication, which has been designed with an ‘ethno-chic’ look, includes key data of 10 African countries, including information about ICT operators within each country, the ’supply side’ of the telecom markets (including mobile and fixed) and the ‘demand side’ which drives these markets.
Editor Alison Gillwald writes: ‘This research seeks to build an African research base to provide the data and analysis necessary for African decision-making to make informed, evidence-based appropriate policies.’
Download the book by chapter now!
Christiaan Bester, one of our greatest volunteers, is currently studying towards a postgraduate intellectual property law degree at the University of Texas and has written two great pieces to report back on what he has observed in the US since his arrival in late August.
“I attended a panel discussion today filmed by Court TV at the University of Texas Law School on “Protecting IP.” The topic is nothing new in the US. It is not even the real hotbed of contention in the current political climate where the indictment of the Vice-President’s Chief of Staff and the competency levels of the latest Supreme Court nominee seem to receive saturated attention from all the big networks.
What captivated my interest as a visiting student from the African continent though, was the composition of the panel: Alberto Gonzales (US Attorney General), Carlos Gutierrez (US Commerce Secretary), Senator John Cornyn, House Representative Lamar Smith (an important friend of the IP fraternity) and a number of industry leaders as well as UT Law Professor Ronald Mann.
Here was a real opportunity to find out how the prevailing wisdom on IP protection reads in the US circa 2005.
Does this wisdom still hold that ‘absolute forms of IP Protection are required to maintain the competitive edge of US goods and services in a global economy irrespective of the any perceived detrimental social costs?’
When it became apparent that the Internet’s nullification of traditional copyright law posed a very real threat to US hopes of remaining competitive in a digital marketplace that had just become global, this kind of wisdom quickly spread across the IP populous in the late 1990’s following the enactment of the DMCA by Congress.
Collectively taken, it would be fair to say that the views held by the panel constituted the mainstream views on IP Law as we know it today – protection of IP is essential to create an incentive for further innovation and artistic creativity. Throw in a strong flavor of protecting US economic interests in the global marketplace – IP being one tool to achieve this end – and at face value, it would seem that nothing much has changed since the passage of the DMCA.
What surprised me though, was that there seems to have developed a real awareness in the US that:
* IP Laws will never eliminate all copying;
* too much protection can actually be counterproductive as it eliminates necessary competition for further innovation and artistic creativity;
* prosecuting millions of college kids who download pirated music is a waste
of government resources that could be utilized for more pressing needs like Federal Emergency Relief in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (or fighting wars in the Middle East if you like);
* educating the rest of the world on the importance of IP will never succeed
unless the benefits of IP can be transferred to the inhabitants of the far corners of the earth.
Does this realization represent a fundamental shift on how the US sees IP law? Perhaps it does if one considers Senator Cornyn’s suggestion that lawmakers should undertake the equivalent of the ‘Hippocratic Oath’ and promise that they will do no ‘harm’ when legislating on IP Issues.
But wait, from the language used by Attorney-General Gonzales it is apparent that we have in fact not witnessed a sea change on US policy in the last few years on IP law. He spoke of the content industries (presumably he was referring to the Recording Industry Association and the Motion Picture Association of America) throughout the discussion as the ‘victim’ industries.
Are the RIAA and MPAA the only victims under the current IP legislative scheme? Perhaps the answer is in the affirmative if one construes the ‘harm’ Senator Cornyn referred to as implying a direct loss of CD and DVD sales as a result of peer-to-peer file sharing.
However, we know that the RIAA and MPAA are not the only victims under the current IP legislative scheme. The social costs of current IP laws go much further than the creators of content – its reach has a broader dimension in the form of the social costs to the public interest that relies on an IP legislative scheme that crafts a proper balance between free access and ownerhsip.
It is this public interest that requires a balance between the public domain and the private rights guarded by IP law in order to allow the kind of free competition essential for a vibrant economy. Where the public domain becomes eroded as is the case under under the current IP legislative scheme, innovation and creative vibrancy is reduced to second class citizens and the IP system forfeits some of its original legitimacy – to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.
Closer to South Africa, the core of current US views on IP law is the need to encourage innovation. The US seems very concerned about its ability to remain competitive in view of the emergence of sleeping technological giants like China and India, where 650,000 and 150,000 engineers respectively graduate from university per annum, as opposed to the US figure of only 90,000.
Applied to South Africa, do we have enough engineers, scientists and mathematicians who are coming through every year to ensure that we at least have some role to play in the global market?
While there are perhaps other pressing needs that require our attention, the need to foster the right climate that encourages innovation is so important that it would be irresponsible to place it on the backburner indefinitely.”
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