The emergence of the Internet and the digital world has changed the way people access, produce and share information and knowledge. Yet people in Africa face challenges in accessing scholarly publications, journals and learning materials in general. At the heart of these challenges, and solutions to them, is copyright, the branch of intellectual property rights that covers written and related works.

This book gives the reader an understanding of the legal and practical issues posed by copyright for access to learning materials in Africa, and identifies the relevant lessons, best policies and best practices that would broaden and deepen this access. This book is based on the work of the African Copyright and Access to Knowledge (ACA2K) research network, launched in late 2007 as a network of researchers committed to probing the relationship between copyright and learning materials access in eight African countries: Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa and Uganda.

Read the foreword by Sisule F. Musungu

The African Copyright and Access to Knowledge (ACA2K) project’s researchers are not the first to recognise the problem of the lack of evidence for copyright policymaking, or the urgent need for a better understanding of the impacts of copyright and other intellectual property (IP) laws, policies and regulations on everyday life issues, such as on access to educational and learning materials. However, it is no exaggeration to say that the ACA2K project is the first to deploy a sophisticated interdisciplinary collaborative research methodology and to generate on-the-ground empirical evidence on the impact of copyright on a particular sector across a group of countries.

As early as 2002, the UK Commission on Intellectual Property Rights had observed that ‘WIPO ... should give explicit recognition to both the benefits and costs of IP protection and the corresponding need to adjust domestic regimes in developing countries to ensure that the costs do not outweigh the benefits’.1 In the ensuing debates, including the debates between 2004 and 2007 at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) on establishing a ‘development agenda’ for the organisation, new terminology has emerged to describe the optimum IP policy for developing countries. We have increasingly heard or read phrases like: ‘IP is not an end in itself,’ ‘one size does not fit all,’ ‘developing countries need flexibilities and policy space,’ ‘IP rules must take into account the levels of development of each country,’ ‘IP is a cross-cutting issue,’ and so forth. These phrases have become mantras in IP policymaking and scholarship and have had important catalytic effects for international initiatives, such as the WIPO development agenda. But what do these phrases and terminology mean, for example, in the area of copyright?

Copyright laws and policies cover many controversial issues that are linked to different disciplines, in science, culture, technology, economics, law and other fields. The concepts and issues in the field are also approached from different perspectives and with different political and economic agendas, sometimes in a misleading context, and often in an imprecise manner. For this reason, policymaking in the area of copyright, particularly in developing countries, has at best been guesswork and at worst uninformed. At the international level, debates and rule-making on copyright, as with other IP, are punctuated with propaganda, anecdotes and dogma. This is what Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and others have called ‘faith-based’ policymaking. Evidence to justify particular policies or laws is rare. Evidence of the real world impact of specific copyright or, for that matter, other IP laws or policies, is almost unheard of. The ACA2K project is unique because the work summarised in this book provides evidence both for policymaking and of the impacts of copyright in the real world.

1 Commission on Intellectual Property Rights Integrating intellectual property rights and development policy (2002) London, at 159.

But this book, and the work of the ACA2K project, is not pioneering only because of the illuminating findings in all the eight study countries. It is pioneering also because of the replicable research methodology developed, and the interdisciplinary collaboration in an area that is usually seen as a preserve of lawyers. The project is also of immense importance because of its focus on education and learning materials in Africa, where copyright is always associated with the positive aspects of promoting African music and culture. This research tells us that while copyright laws and policies might have positive effects in one sector, the same is not necessarily universally true. Other project outcomes, such as building networked research capacity on the areas of IP, knowledge governance and development, and the exploratory work on examining the gender aspects of copyright and access, are also ground-breaking. Finally, the publication of this volume under an innovative open licensing agreement with one of Africa’s largest publishers puts the ACA2K project in a special place – because the researchers are walking the talk of access to knowledge by ensuring that this important work is widely available and accessible across Africa and beyond.

The real measure of the success of the work of the ACA2K project and this book will, however, be the extent to which it challenges researchers, scholars, policymakers, civil society, industry players and other stakeholders in the international copyright system, including international organisations such as WIPO, to work to bring meaning to phrases like ‘IP is not an end in itself’. The various dissemination events on the preliminary research findings of the ACA2K work at the national and international levels have shown that the project’s work is already making a difference. This book promises to amplify the project’s impact. Even those who consider themselves experts on IP will benefit immensely from this book and the broader ACA2K project’s work. The ACA2K work provides many insights, offers many lessons, gives us a methodology to interrogate the question of benefits and costs of IP laws and policies and, above all, this project proves that copyright policy can immensely benefit from interdisciplinary empirical research and impact studies in the field.

The entire ACA2K project team deserves to be congratulated for taking up, and delivering on, such an ambitious and innovative initiative. The vision and foresight of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the Shuttleworth Foundation, who provided the financial support for the project work, including this book, must also be commended.

Sisule F. Musungu

President, IQsensato; and Managing Director, IQsensato Consulting

Read the e-book version on www.idrc.ca/openebooks/490-1/