I attended the APC hosted A2K workshop on Wednesday with a bag of expectations. The schedule looked promising, the participants were supposed to come from a wide variety of professions and organisations. I must say most of those expectations were fulfilled – which was a lot thanks to the great facilitation and organisation of the event. Mark the facilitator made a great job right from start with a comprehensive session of different ways of showing tha participants background, based on profession, based on purpose of participating, based on rights-holders or non-rights-holders side etc. that displayed background of the participants.
The red thread of the day was current copyright legislation here in South Africa → the problems it leads to → possible solutions → and how to reach such solutions.
There were a number of different perspectives brought up, everything from open source and open standards to access for blind people and free provision of education material. It’s easy to forget how much impact a legislation such as the copytight legislation has for different groups of society; that software developers, teachers and blind are affected by the same small provisions in the legislation.
There were a number of different suggested solutions to the problems brought up. Simple solutions such as removing the ban on parallell import of coyright goods which would open the South African market to a number distributors in different countries such as India or Brazil. Other Solutions such as a new legislation with a high focus on informations commons were mentioned. Just to mention a few, the participants discussed actively and were interested in the others view and to deliver suggestions on how to change the existing copyright legislation. What I did lack however, was that there was more or less only a normative approach, a focus on how the legislation could be changed. In IP in general and I think especially copyrught there are huge possibilities to be creative in the current system – not to say that it should not be changed – but there is much space to act already before changes in the legislations are made I believe.
But in the end, a very good day with a lot of knowledge shared. //HENRIK