April saw the official launch of the African Copyright & Access to Knowledge (ACA2K) website and Research Methodology.

The ACA2K Project is probing the relationship between national copyright environments and access to hard-copy and digital learning materials in 8 African countries. The project is specifically conducted within an access to knowledge (A2K) framework – a framework which regards the protection and promotion of user access as one of the central objectives of copyright law.

The Methodology Guide acts as roadmap for this project’s research and policy engagement, and is also openly licensed under CC-BY-SA to allow others to reuse it as guideline for similar studies in their own countries. We need to understand the actual usage and restrictions placed on these materials if we are ever to enable them to be as freely available as they were originally intended to be.

We join the IDRC in supporting this initiative that is managed by the Wits University LINK Centre in Johannesburg.

We hosted two stakeholder workshops, one each in Johannesburg and the other in Cape Town, as part of the South African Open Copyright Review. Like ACA2K, this project is conducted within an access to knowledge (A2K) framework. The workshops provided an introduction for interested parties on critical points relating to access to knowledge and the South African Copyright Act and was well attended by academics, artists, industry representatives and lawyers alike.

The real engagement with these issues will be taking place online to allow a broad base of input and discussion. We are inviting everyone with an interest in access to knowledge to join the discussion by visiting the wiki and making their voice heard on the community portal.

We also released our annual IP Briefing ahead of World IP Day (World IP Day briefing) on 26 April, highlighting some of the successes and challenges faced in access to knowledge and IP in the past year and mentioning what lies ahead. These included congratulations to the SA government for the release of the Ministerial Interoperability Operating Standards (MIOS) and to SABS, the South African standards body, for joining standards bodies in Brazil, India and China in resisting the global campaign to make the Microsoft created OOXML specification into a second document standard.