Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Creative Commons South Africa (CC Za) is now hosted at Intellectual Property Law Research, at the Department of Private Law at the University of Cape Town Law School.

In a previous post, the Traditions of Knowledge I referred to the appropriation of traditional knowledge by means of industrial revolution intellectual property.

Conventional intellectual property laws claim to confer rights only on knowledge that is individually authored, reduced to material form and 'original'. The antithesis of that modern knowledge paradigm is traditional knowledge which is by its nature traditional, communal and frequently oral.

I am putting up (almost) daily blogposts on my blog at www.aliquidnovi.org.

Most of the posts relate to intellectual property and access to knowledge in Africa, hence the title.

For the next three days I will be blogging at Icommons.org on the
Access to Knowledge Conference, held at Yale Law School, hosted by the Yale Information Society Project.

icommons Africa is a new project dedicated to Nurturing the African Commons.

Africans living in a continent so rich in culture and heritage, often struggle to benefit from those riches. For centuries Africans have created together.
Now technology provides new ways in which Africans can continue the tradition of creative co-operation.

We plan to nurture the growth of the African commons, a treasury of collaboratively produced, open access works.

"So the main idea behind the African Commons Project is about nurturing the idea of an “information commons” in Africa - discovering what that is, what it should encompass, and how it should be built and sustained.

THE AFRICAN COMMONS PROJECT is an inspiring project, but what especially impresses me about the blog is the language. Its about time IMO that ITC dicourse is enriched by a language of connectedness, nurture, and wholeness.

Full Disclosure: I am an active participant in the Project.

On July 9 2005 the Supreme Court of British Columbia issued an astonishing injunction against anyone who had bought or obtained a copy of a book.

The injunction, a John and Jane Doe order, forbade anyone who had received a copy of the book from:
• copying the whole or part of the book;
• disclosing any information from the book;
• selling displaying or publicly exhibiting the book;
• making any use of the book;
• destroying, concealing, parting with possession of the book OR any notes or descriptions of it;
• returning all copies, notes or descriptions of the book BUT deleting electronic copies;

To anyone even remotely familiar with blogging, websites etc its pretty obvious that a blog isn't a formal statement by the blogger on ANYTHING.

Even more obviously nothing that I say in this blog is neccesarily the views of Stanford CIS, anyone who I work for, anyone I work with, anyone I teach, my family, my pets or anyone I talk to at Buzz 9, SOMA or Buzz 9 Melville.

It may be that blogging is a truly characteristically post modern form of expression in which the work is always in progress and posts are are often provocative, playful, funny, and subject to change.

As I said in my previous blog entry, the Telkom/Helkom dispute has been settled.

Its interesting to look at the copyright issue and compare;

the Telkom image:

which constitutes an artistic work as defined in section 1 of the
South African Copyright Act 98 of 1978:

" 'artistic work' means, irrespective of the artistic quality thereof-

(a) paintings, sculptures, drawings, engravings and photographs;"