Balls donated by bafanakids.org, CC BY 2.0

The FIFA Soccer World Cup (trademarked) is just around the corner, and South Africans from all walks of life are gearing up for the event.  Already government schools have taken shorter summer holidays over the festive period because the mid-year holiday (our winter vacation) will be extended to accommodate Cup events.  South African consumers have been overwhelmed by a deluge of advertisements portraying ecstatic vuvuzela-blowing fans.  Traffic congestion, from roadworks feverishly nearing completion in the run-up to the Cup, has been the great leveller affecting all commuters from those travelling in local mini-bus taxis, to buses and car drivers.  Thus, the World Cup resolutely draws nearer and we are all caught up in the hype, whether we like it or not.

For the average vuvuzela blower in the street, the excessive controversy that has surrounded the Cup does not perhaps seem that significant; after all, match fixing does occur, nepotism still exists, and rules and regulations will be made to inconvenience us.  However, those who have been in FIFA’s direct line of fire will know better, and its the dire, age-old story of domination and power to which South Africa, given our country’s past, should not turn a blind eye.

“The Alternative Government”

Perhaps the relief that the South African government felt when the world cup was awarded to this country was so overwhelming that they entered into negotiations light of heart … and, some may say, minds.  Seemingly, selling off the country’s rights was an okay exchange for the Cup.  FIFA, known for stringent host-country requirements, could not have had a better deal when the SA government not only agreed to, but exceeded expectations.  For 11 days this country will be managed by a powerful law enforcer, where the hard-won constitutional rights of freedom of speech and freedom of movement will take a backseat to commercial gain that will largely benefit FIFA and its official sponsors.

In an interview with Zeenat Hansrod of Radio France Internationale, Alex Duval-Smith, a freelance journalist for British newspaper The Observer, and Raymond Louw, deputy chairman of the Media Freedom Committee of Sanef (South African National Editorial Forum) discuss the media restrictions that are to be put in place.  According to Duval-Smith, FIFA is effectively writing the law on media rights in this country. Accredited media will not be permitted to report on anything that brings FIFA and the Cup into disrepute.  In essence this means that should there, for example, be a demonstration outside one of the soccer stadiums, the media would be restricted on reporting this event if it showed FIFA or its sponsors in a negative light.   This directly curtails citizens’ right to information’; at its zenith, a media blackout reminiscent of the Apartheid regime.  Furthermore, accredited media and bloggers alike beware:  FIFA has also sold off its “new media” rights.  Thus, taking photographs at games using cell phones will be a breach of copyright; a punishable offence.  Media websites will not be permitted to record and publish their own multimedia and will only be allowed to run text descriptions on their websites.  Photographs can be used but only if they are published not in sequence (in other words, in an attempt to show a moving image sequence.)

The Irony of the “African World Cup”
It doesn’t end there.  What about the informal sector, which is as organically African as the vuvuzela?  This Third Economy of hawkers and informal entrepreneurs piggy-backs off popular events to make its living within a system that has not adequately supported them.  According to FIFA regulations, no one is permitted to sell non-official FIFA products within 800 metres of the stadium walls, including newspapers.

If it all sounds rather melodramatic, bear in mind that three of the most powerful media stables in the country, Media 24, Avusa and The Independent Group, have submitted (via an attorney) objections to FIFA regulations and claim infringement of the South African Constitution.  We vuvuzela blowers wait in anticipation for the outcome of this bold move.

Source: Flickr, Stravinsky Fountain by Niki de Saint Phalle, near Centre Pompidou/Paris by cangaroojack

When the DST called for public comment to the proposed Regulations that will govern the Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research Bill that was signed into law last year, there was a general outcry from a number of research and academic institutions, as well as local and international activists and academics from within the A2K movement.  The story was reported on by the media both locally and abroad.  The opposition flagged the issue that greater consultation was needed before adoption of the Regulations.

Since the submission deadline, TACP, as one of the organisations who submitted commentary,  has not had any feedback from the Department, or found accessible comment regarding the public commentary process and outcome.  (TACP organised an open, online petition against the Regulations.)   However,  a public appearance by the Minister at the Innovation Hub in Pretoria where she opened the National Biotechnology Workshop in late July, seems to confirm that the Department is committed to passing the Regulations despite the alternative viewpoints offered by civil society.   The fact that the criticisms raised – around how to manage the commercial imperative against public benefit; how and if a body such as the proposed IP office will hinder or enhance research process – seem to be implicitly accepted as uncontroversial issues makes one wonder about the consultation process.

Local and international academics, activists and researchers were committed to spending time drafting, talking, debating and considering how to put forward their concerns around the proposed Regulations.  Yet how significant was the call for commentary to the passing of these Regulations?  Was this simply a ticking of a box of requirements?  We would really like to know.

The report, which has been compiled by The African Commons Project in partnership with The Alternative Law Forum (ALF) in India, Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) in Brazil, and UK-based charity iCommons, contextualises the respective copyright regimes by outlining the particular influences and history of copyright as experienced within each country. Of particular interest is the status of each country in terms of a copyright review process: India, having undergone a review previously, Brazil currently going through a government-led copyright review process that is inclusive of various stakeholders, and South Africa, which is yet to go through an official review, but has had an independent review led by Andrew Rens, Fellow at The Shuttleworth Foundation.

The report highlights the need for copyright reform, and also shows the controversial aspect of copyright which includes a push-pull between public interests and private rights (corporations and culture producers who fight to increase their stake in intellectual property rights.

Download the BISA Review in pdf here.

JSE by MauritsV on flickr.com, CC BY-SA 2.0

This month’s Wired magazine has a fantastic story about how concepts that are at the core of TACP’s vision – transparency coupled with collaboration, would make for a more responsible and accountable financial sector. In this article, Daniel Roth takes a retrospective look at how the demand for transparency that came about after the global economic crisis of 1929, has in fact become extreme to the point of murkiness. He writes the “volume of data obscures more than it reveals; financial reporting has become so transparent as to be invisible.”

The article continues:

“…We need to rethink our entire philosophy of regulation. Instead of assigning oversight responsibility to a finite group of bureaucrats, we should enable every investor to act as a citizen-regulator. We should tap into the massive parallel processing power of people around the world by giving everyone the tools to track, analyze, and publicize financial machinations. The result would be a wave of decentralized innovation that can keep pace with Wall Street and allow the market to regulate itself—naturally punishing companies and investments that don’t measure up—more efficiently than the regulators ever could.

The revolution will be powered by data, which should be unshackled from the pages of regulatory filings and made more flexible and useful. We must require public companies and all financial firms to report more granular data online—and in real time, not just quarterly—uniformly tagged and exportable into any spreadsheet, database, widget, or Web page. The era of sunlight has to give way to the era of pixelization; only when we give everyone the tools to see each point of data will the picture become clear.

This is a radical idea for the financial sector but not for the digital citizens who have been working in this space for a long time – we know that many heads are better than one or even two, and that by sharing information we nurture knowledge and foster creativity.

Reading this story was incredibly heartening because it shows how the concept of openness can be applied to all areas of life – not just in education, the media and the arts, where it has been most successful thus far, but to parts of society we never typically have thought would be compatible – finance (I’m imagining a massive financial Wikipedia coined Finpedia?), but what about other facets of public life such as government (this recent article on Wired.com discusses President Obama’s new focus on opening up access to government data). These revolutionary concepts show how where there is a public stake, when so much hinges on the whole being greater than the some of its parts, it only makes sense to call for collaboration. Because when that information is freed into the public domain, you open it up to millions of minds, one of who might have a different take on the same data – asking new questions, searching for commonalities across seemingly disparate groups of information. The possibilities are endless, the outcomes almost certainly always innovative and for the public good.

According to Creative Freedom Foundation, who is running this campaign, “Section 92 of the Copyright Amendment Act assumes Guilt Upon Accusation and forces the termination of internet connections and websites without evidence, without a fair trial, and without punishment for any false accusations of copyright infringement.”

This is an outrageous amendment, but why does this matter to us South Africans (and Africans), not quite on the other side of the world, but quite a distance away at least? It matters because this issue is about a broader problem within modern society – people in power not understanding that technology is an opportunity and not a threat, how copyright needs to be reinterpreted to match technological progress, and how reactive responses to piracy will simply lead to a public outcry. This issue highlights how South Africa need public education and effective lobbying on new and innovative approaches to copyright in preparation for our Copyright Act amendment. As the CFF states, “Laws like this will keep being proposed unless there is wide understanding within the [art] community of what’s being done in our name. The long-term solution is for you to help fellow artists understand the issues.” So get your black square and more information at http://creativefreedom.org.nz, and pass it on!

On a different note, we’ve been thinking about creating and implementing effective internet ‘meme’s’ and have been marveling at the success of this campaign. In our opinion this has been really effective because of the powerful message behind the campaign that really fires people up because this law will have a tangible effect on how they use the internet in the future. We like the simplicity of the campaign (all you really need to do is right click, save as and then replace your profile pic – three easy steps!) and the ‘many pronged approach’ they have undertaken – the very least you can do is follow the three easy steps, tweet it, or change your Facebook profile – or if you’re more enthusiastic – you can email government, add banners to your site, sign the petition, attend a rally and more. It’s all about providing a variety of platforms for people to be involved ‘on their own terms’ with easy ways to pass the message on.

We congratulate Creative Freedom Foundation and wish them well in the last eight days of their countdown to 28 February.

Throughout 2008, The African Commons Project has been working in conjunction with the Shuttleworth Foundation in Cape Town, on the Open Copyright Review. The review was a project that aimed to engage civil society and ordinary South Africans in a review of how they understand copyright, and how South African copyright law affects them and the work that they do. It follows the review model used by the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore, India, not only because this is a useful model for commenting on law, but also because the ALF review is a useful model of how a developing nation with an inherited colonial copyright system can approach the law and modulate it to meet the unique needs and features of a developing country.

After many discussions and workshops, and the opportunity to comment on an online wiki, the various concerns, comments and suggestions made were combined into a Report that included a plain language review of South African copyright law, as well as a critique of the areas of the Act that should be reviewed and recommendations of possible changes that could be made.

In general, the Report focused on access to knowledge resources and learning materials, and examined how the restrictive, European-style law that is currently in place has, in the past, had a chilling effect on the access of learners to knowledge, especially in the area of electronic resources. Many of recommendations that were made have the potential to liberate knowledge and make it easier to access for many South Africans.

The huge advances made in technology (particularly in the digital realm) since the Act was passed in 1978 have also completely revolutionised the way South Africans engage with content, copyright and technology. No provisions were made for these advanced in the 1978 Act, and one of the objectives of the Review was to make recommendations that take these advances, and any future development that may take place, and make provisions for them in the Act.

The report also looked at areas of the Act that are vague or narrowly defined like the definition of license. Fair Dealing is also examined, since the definition of Fair Dealing and the exceptions it allows for in the Act are very vague. The Report also examines concepts that are only briefly mentioned, like Orphan Works, Parallel Imports and the Public Domain. All three of these areas offer important freedoms, which could improve access to learning materials.

Throughout the review process and the writing of the Report, the authors attempted wherever possible to use plain language, and make the review as human-readable as possible. One of the objectives of the project was to demystify and develop a vocabulary around copyright, so that ordinary South Africans, who may not have legal expertise, are able to engage in the discussions and debates that are emanating from the review process.
For more information about the process, and to read the resources that are being used in the review, have a look at the Shuttleworth Foundation’s Copyright Review wiki