After months of dissatisfaction within' consumers, in last July EMI Music finally disabled the anti-copy system of the record company's products. The technical protection measures (TPMs) are usually named DRM (Digital Rights Management), being attached to commercial CD's and DVD's to avoid or limit copies of the content. 

 

The article, entitled "Commoners reshape the rules of copyright" discusses Creative Commons as a response to copyright and how it can be utilised in Africa.  As Ford states, "Our intellectual property is one of the most valuable assets we have, and we can’t afford to be an audience to what’s going on in the rest of the world.  Open access could allow Africa to become a real player in the digital game."

Read the article here 

I was in Geneva last week at the ‘Experts Meeting on the Internet Governance Forum’. The meeting was organised by the Consumer Project on Technology, the South Centre and the Third World Network, and we discussed the possibility of taking issues such as the Access to Knowledge Treaty to the newly formed Internet Governance Forum (IGF).

The notion of piracy and its ill effects is getting a good deal of coverage in the South African press.  

 

Piracy is portrayed as an activity which is killing South Africa's cultural industries. The mainstream media is publishing articles that have a strong anti-piracy slant by taking the moral highground, are emotive in tone, and provide frightening financial statistics of piracy's effect on the creative industries.  However, when scrutinised, the moral high-ground appears to be one-sided, not taking into account the variety of voices that could be heard on the issue,  the emotion serves to cloud important issues rather than opening up debate,  and the financial statistics are difficult to extrapolate given their vagueness.