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During June the Foundation made detailed submissions on two draft Bills. As 2009 is an election year, South African government departments are attempting to put all their pending Bills through Parliament in the next term. As a result the next few months will be a very busy period of responding to legislation which affects access to knowledge.
The Foundation made a detailed submission, including draft wording, to the Department of Trade and Industry on exceptions and limitations to copyright for teaching and learning for inclusion in the Intellectual Property Amendment Bill before it is brought before Parliament.
The Competition Amendment Bill is currently before Parliament. The Foundation made a focused submission to the Parliamentary Committee on a single critical issue. The competition authorities should be given clear power to curb anti-competitive conduct in respect of intellectual property rights.
Shuttleworth IP Fellow Andrew Rens gave a keynote address on openness to the Workshop on Open Standards for XML documents in Government, organised by the Departments of Science and Technology and Home Affairs, held at the Tshwane University of Technology. Other notable speakers included Rob Weir, Co-Chair of the OASIS ODF Technical Committee, and Patrick Durusau, Editor of the OpenDocument Format (ODF).
It has been extensively covered in the press in South Africa and the DST has a coherent overview as does Tectonic.
In other open standards news, ISO put the standard for Microsoft’s OOXML document formats on hold in June. After member states, including South Africa, filed four complaints against the standardisation of Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) document format, the International Standards Organisation (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in Geneva have responded by postponing publication of
the revised specification. As the ISO announced, the planned ISO/IEC DIS 29500 cannot be published until these complaints have been heard.
What we do in this area:
“Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) were originally instituted to encourage the creation and invention of public goods for the benefit of society by allowing creators and inventors to protect their intellectual property. However, IPR has become overly restrictive in recent times as corporate interests have led to an ever increasing demand for lock-down on rights.
The Shuttleworth Foundation supports initiatives that call for the establishment of national and global IPR regimes that seek an appropriate balance between encouraging innovation and benefiting society, the original purpose of creating the rights.”
This month’s highlights:
In a courageous and hugely impressive move, the Minister for the Public Service and Administration Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi set the Minimum Interoperability Standards for Information Systems (MIOS) in government, which will mean a move to Open Source Software. We believe that the implementation of this standard will greatly enhance interoperability and document management.
We are actively campaigning against Microsoft’s proposed OOXML standard and believe that the ODF, being a current and working standard needs to be maintained. ODF essentially means that no matter what document writing software you use, the actual content will not be lost over time by interoperability issues. South Africa voted in opposition to the proposed standard in September, and we are now in an appeal process.
We enabled Nnenna Nwakanma from FOSSFA to attend the ISO ballot resolution meeting on OOXML in Geneva as part of the CODINORM, the Standards Board of Cote d’Ivoire, delegation. She has been fantastic in helping us understand the African debate and see where the pressure points with other African nations are. Nnenna’s preliminary feedback has been that the meeting did not cover nearly all of the discussion points on the table and that there is a great deal to be done in sharing information between vote-entitled African countries in the 30 days before the final vote is due. She is leading a group discussion and initiatives on this.
Andrew Rens participated in an interview debate for Brainstorm Magazine with Microsoft representative David Ives on OOXML and open standards. The interview will be published in the April edition of Brainstorm.
