Intellectual property rights

During June the Foundation made detailed submissions on two draft Bills. As 2009 is an election year, South African government departments are attempting to put all their pending Bills through Parliament in the next term. As a result the next few months will be a very busy period of responding to legislation which affects access to knowledge.

The Foundation made a detailed submission, including draft wording, to the Department of Trade and Industry on exceptions and limitations to copyright for teaching and learning for inclusion in the Intellectual Property Amendment Bill before it is brought before Parliament.

The Competition Amendment Bill is currently before Parliament. The Foundation made a focused submission to the Parliamentary Committee on a single critical issue. The competition authorities should be given clear power to curb anti-competitive conduct in respect of intellectual property rights.

Shuttleworth IP Fellow Andrew Rens gave a keynote address on openness to the Workshop on Open Standards for XML documents in Government, organised by the Departments of Science and Technology and Home Affairs, held at the Tshwane University of Technology. Other notable speakers included Rob Weir, Co-Chair of the OASIS ODF Technical Committee, and Patrick Durusau, Editor of the OpenDocument Format (ODF).

It has been extensively covered in the press in South Africa and the DST has a coherent overview as does Tectonic.

In other open standards news, ISO put the standard for Microsoft’s OOXML document formats on hold in June. After member states, including South Africa, filed four complaints against the standardisation of Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) document format, the International Standards Organisation (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in Geneva have responded by postponing publication of
the revised specification. As the ISO announced, the planned ISO/IEC DIS 29500 cannot be published until these complaints have been heard.