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.