PROJECTS

African Comparative Copyright Review

Yvonne — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 15:38:10 +0200

The overarching objective of the African Comparative Copyright Review project is to empower researchers in five study countries to develop the evidence necessary for stakeholders in their countries to pursue development of a copyright environment that maximises the opportunities for digital and hard-copy learning material access.

It is widely held that the provisions of a country's copyright legislation can have a significant impact on that country's development efforts. The justification advanced for the limitation on freedom of expression imposed by copyright legislation is that copyright is intended to provide incentives for the creation and distribution of works, and thus promote access to knowledge. Assessing the impact of copyright on access to knowledge requires an investigation into whether the restrictions on access to knowledge imposed by copyright are justified by the resultant gain in access to knowledge.

There is concern that for developing countries that are net importers of products covered by copyright rules, failure to take advantage of the exceptions and limitations allowed by international copyright treaties can restrictaccess to learning materials for the citizenry.

However, copyright legislation and its impact on access to learning materials has received little research attention in Africa and what changes have taken place in copyright statutes have been driven by global agreements rather than by localised development-focused analyses.

This project aims to reverse this trend in five African countries by probing the copyright environments in these particular territories and determining the degree to which access to learning materials in both hard-copy and digital formats is a function of these prevailing copyright environments.

A descriptive analysis of the legal copyright framework that includes policy, law, regulations and judicial decisions shall be conducted in the five study countries; Egypt, Ghana, Senegal, South Africa and Uganda. Particular attention will be paid to the success or failure of copyright in promoting access to knowledge and learning materials in these analyses. In addition each country’s more general copyright climate is to be examined as interpreted and interacted with by relevant learning material stakeholders. Case studies shall be conducted of learning material settings or groups, looking at experiences of access to digital and hard-copy learning materials within the existing copyright climate.

Finally, a comparative review of the findings across the five countries will be conducted in an effort to extract learnings to be brought to bear on copyright policy making in these five countries at regional and international levels.

This ACCR project has a 28-month timeline stretching between 2007 and 2009. The project is being implemented by the LINK Centre, with core funding from the IDRC.

Draft Bill on IPR from Publicly Funded Research

Yvonne — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 16:59:53 +0200

The South African government's Department of Science and Technology has published a draft bill that aims to increase the socio-economic impact of publicly financed research.

The approach in the bill is to try to achieve this by massively increasing patents generated from research conducted at publicly funded institutions, predominantly higher education institutions.

It is important to the development of South Africa that South Africans benefit from research which has a socio economic impact. The Shuttleworth Foundation believes that there are important ways of encouraging socio-economic impact and especially innovation, which aren't in the draft form of the bill. The Foundation therefore responded to the department's invitation to comment.

The draft bill stated that every research output from South African universities would have to be screened to see if there was anything that could potentiality be patented. Anything the university chooses not to patent would be considered for patenting under a second review by a central government office. This would impact on everyone who carries out research at a science council or a university, including all students studying at South African universities.

The Foundation's submission aimed to clarify the difference between invention and innovation. Invention happens when someone comes up with a novel technology and creates something that hasn't been done before. Innovation is when something new changes society, such as when a new product generates a new market. The objective of researchers is understanding, while the objective of entrepreneurs is innovation.

The Department of Science and Technology has undertaken to consider all the submissions made to it it, and will decide what action to take. It is the hope of the Shuttleworth Foundation that its submissions will be taken into consideration and the bill reformulated.

OOXML

Yvonne — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 16:56:13 +0200

Remember when Apple computer couldn't read MS Word documents, and neither Apple nor MS Word could read WordPerfect?

That is the kind of problem caused by having multiple incompatible document formats. To solve this problem the major computer companies got together and created a single open format. Open because anyone could develop a program to use it. The standard for this format is Open Document Format (ODF) which is used by a wide variety of software including the open source community. This standard was adopted as the standard for open document formats by the International Standards Organization several years ago.

OOXML is a recent Microsoft-developed document format which has has been submitted for approval to the International Organisation for Standardization (ISO). A successful application by Microsoft would lead to the existence of two mutually incompatible standards for the same thing.

Member organisations of the International Organisation for Standardization voted in September 2007 on whether or not to allow OOXML as an official alternative standard to the existing standard of the Open Document Format. The South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) represented South Africa in this vote.

On 18 July 2007, SC71L, a sub-committee of the SABS, was asked to make a technical assesment and recommendation on how South Africa should vote on the further progress of the proposed DIS29500 standard that would allow for the approval of OOXML.

As a member of the committee eligible to vote, the Shuttleworth Foundation supported the majority vote against the adoption of OOXML as a standard. The argument that the proposed standard represents the best solution to the perceived problem of rendering legacy documents was rejected and a number of technical concerns raised. Certain patents which Microsoft has been able to obtain in South Africa but not in other countries such as the United States, pose a significant problem for the general IP undertaking required by ISO.

In total 13 voting members disapproved of allowing OOXML as an additional standard and 4 approved, showing that the significant majority view is that South Africa sees no benefit in adopting another standard for document formats in this area.

On 2 September the SABS representative to ISO cast a vote against the approval of OOXML as an international standard for document formatting, as did the majority of representatives from other ISO member organisations.

The Shuttleworth Foundation concurs with this rejection and maintains its ongoing commitment to the progress of truly open standards, such as ODF.

Open Review of the SA Copyright Act

Yvonne — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 16:54:29 +0200

The Open Review of the South African Copyright Act is a project driven by the Shuttleworth Foundation and the Trade Law Centre for Southern Africa (tralac) in partnership with the Open Society Institute (OSI). It aims to review the provisions of the current South African Copyright Act with particular focus on sections which impact on access to knowledge, especially access to learning materials. There review will link knowledge policy debate and the technical details of copyright legislation through a clear, consistent and thorough critique of South African copyright legislation.

Both globally and in South Africa copyright law has not changed as rapidly as technology. The current South African Copyright Act was passed in 1978. The difference in pace of change generates uncertainties about the creative use of new media. It is imperative for access to knowledge advocacy that those engaging in research, advocacy and the legislative process be provided with a guide which links the mechanics of the current act to its impact on access to knowledge. The Alternative Law Forum review of the Indian Copyright Act has proven that a section by section review of existing legislation is a helpful analytical tool for those engaging in policy making in the area of copyright.

The review is open for comment to the broader community on the Copyright Review wiki.

Comment's from voices not usually heard in copyright discussion - librarians, the sensory disabled, software engineers, artists and new media users such as bloggers - are especially important.

Publishing Merger

Yvonne — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 16:58:27 +0200

On 26 July 2007 the Shuttleworth Foundation made a submission to the South African Competition Commission opposing the merger application of international publishing companies Pearson PLC and Harcourt Education International. The proposed merger of these enterprises would result in the integration of local subsidiaries Maskew Miller Longman and Heinemann Publishing in South Africa.

A successful international and subsequent local integration would have a negative impact on local education by driving greater concentration of an already over-concentrated publishing industry for educational materials. In particular, the local textbook market would be impacted upon in terms of pricing, diversity, relevance, local content and local language availability.

On 14 August 2007 the Commission decided to conditionally approve the merger between Pearson PLC and Harcourt International on condition that the parties may not integrate their South African businesses. If they ever intend to do so in the future, they have to notify the Competition Commission which will trigger a similar investigation.

This is a very positive result given that the Commission made specific mention of the public interest concerns in its decision. In addition to preventing the potential merger of Maskew Miller Longman and Heineman it is the hope of the Shuttleworth Foundation that the intervention will prompt the authority to further investigate the school textbook market that suffers from unnecessary complexity and creates barriers to education in its current form. We continue to monitor this issue.

rip-mix-and-learn

Yvonne — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 15:27:43 +0200

The rip-mix-and-learn project was launched as a hands-on research intervention at the University of the Western Cape in June 2007. It is supported by the Shuttleworth Foundation, and investigates what happens when students use Web 2.0 applications to become producers of their own knowledge, rather than consumers of information prepared for them.

Effective education demands creativity, but today's elearning environments focus primarily on distribution of information to students, rather than on creation and construction of knowledge by students. Textbooks are written, educational television programs are produced, multimedia learning materials are created for students to learn from them. Educational resources are seen, implicitly, as something produced by so-called experts for use by learners.

In such a model, there is little room for active participation by the learner. The system is designed based on the implicit assumption that learners have little to contribute to the creation of teaching and learning resources and therefore need resources to be created for them.

The rip-mix-and-learn project investigates what happens when we place the learner in the centre rather then at periphery of instruction; embedded in social communities of peers, and learning through interaction with resources and people.

Rip-mix-learn describes a process in which students collaboratively identify, evaluate, adapt, synthesize and create electronic content. Learners become producers of a significant part of the materials and activities in their courses.

The research looks in detail at different rip-mix-learn practices currently in use at UWC, including:

students producing podcasts,
using blogs to publish their assignments,
reviewing and assessing each others' work,
participating in online discussion lists,
or authoring content collaboratively in wikis.

In all of these courses we ask two broad questions:

How and what are students learning when given more responsibility and opportunity to create their own learning experiences?
What is the role of peer assessment, both for providing support to the learners, and evaluating their work?

The project continues to kick at the boundaries created by conventional learning material design and explores the possibilities created by implementing a remix culture in the education environment.