CI's strategic plan on IP/A2K 2009-2012

Hi everyoneJeremy thank you for the opportunity to engage with the strategy. I am not sure of protocol but am going to go ahead and comment to the group.I will start with some general comments and concerns and then answer Jeremy's two questions.
i. Perhaps there is background which I am missing but I am not clear what the content of 'consumer communications rights' are in the context. Do they include the right not to have communications severed without due process? What about consumer's rights to time and format shift content, rights to use their own  communication devices (with which TPMⁱ interfere) , and rights to circumvent technological protection measures in order to make exceptional use?
ii. The suggestion to draft a single consumer friendly model law misses an opportunity to take advantage of one of the strengths of the Development Agenda which is the suggestion that different countries have different needs. It may therefore make sense to draft not one but two model laws, one for developing countries, and another for least developed countries, which do not need to comply with TRIPSⁱ. Although there is a time line for requiring compliance with TRIPS if LDC's pass laws they will have a stronger incentive to push back that point in time. At the very least drafting an explicilty TRIPS non compliant law is useful for framing purposes.
iii. There are quite a number of suggestions in respect of Africa that governments should subsidise educational materials. Although these emanate from stakeholders my experience suggests that governments are unlikely to respond positively, not least because of resource constraints. Even if governments were to subsidise educational materials there is a risk that the subsidies would simply be captured by incumbent publishers.
Therefore I would advise that reforms in this respect should focus on the market structure of publishing. Publishing models which award separate tenders to content creators, editors, printers and distributors are far more likely to encourage consumer friendly efficiencies and innovation than simple subsidies. Publishing models in which governments acquire the copyrightⁱ, or at a minimum require publication under open licenses will help to disaggregate these sectors. It is likely that print on demand technology will be introduced on a wider scale during the time scale, so that a combination of open licenses and POD technology will introduce efficiencies and lower prices.
To answer Jeremy's questions:(a) Does any of what we plan to do overlap with what others are doing, that you know of?There is an apparent but not actual overlap iro the model law. EIFL have drafted a model copyright law this is primarily informed by the perspective of libraries, and is also based on the WIPOⁱ
model law. In other words it is an attempt, and a laudable attempt, to try
to mitigate the damage that could be done by the WIPO model law. It does
not however open the policy space in the way that a law which begins
from an access to knowledge perspective would do. There is therefore an
urgent need to draft the CIⁱ model law as suggested, and in doing so to
carefully avoid the anchoring of the debate by reference to the WIPO model law or even the EIFL model law.(b) Are there any compelling needs that we have missed in our work programme and should address?Yes, IMO the issue of open standards is critical. Open standards ensure that consumers will not suffer vendor lock in, will be able to transfer their documentation and media from one device/platform/softwareⁱ to another. Open standards also play an important role in ensuring competition. Most critically the adoption of open standards enables the adoption of (open standards complaint) open source, since it enables governments and consumers to switch from proprietary (but standards compliant) solutions to open source solutions.
In this respect there is a nascent African network, which was organized around the open document standard work in national standards bodies across Africa. Although standards work is both technical and often extremely bureaucratic my limited experience to date suggests that national standards bodies are extremely responsive to civil society advocacy.
This network would benefit from considerable capacity building. There may well be similar networks in South America and Asia.Closely related to the issue of open standards is competition regulation. Newly formed competition authorities in developing countries often have strong mandates and relatively good resources. European style regulatory regimes allow public interest interventions, and again my experience (limited in this instance to South Africa) suggests that these authorities are often more fairly responsive to civil society. Interventions often do not carry a cost risk.
Capacity building in this area would involve alerting consumer groups and a2k advocates to  the possibilities, perhaps including a chapter in the A2Kⁱ handbook, and seeking assistance from developed world allies for example University based centres and law clinics, to craft model complaint documentation (and perhaps decision trees).
Competition issues would focus on market structures and actions especially in respect of standards which limit consumer choice.I hope these comments will assist, at least to spark some discussion.best
Andrew2009/6/15 Jeremy Malcolm <jeremy@ciroap.org>
I would like to welcome a second new member to our advisory group, which we're refreshing for 2009-2010 to relieve some of the previous members who couldn't find time to participate.  Thanks Andrew Rens for joining us.  Most of you might know Andrew as a fellow of the Shuttleworth Foundation, or from his work with the ACA2K project, or with Creative Commonsⁱ South Africa, or African Commons, or the Stanford Centre for Internet and Society.

In case any of you have time to offer comments, I'm attaching CI's draft strategic plan on A2K and IP, which is one of the outputs required under our grant from the Ford Foundation, and an important road map for our future activities.  This was developed based on member input received at the three regional meetings that we held this year for the Asia-Pacific, Latin America and Africa.

This will be presented to the A2K project steering group, which is a subset of the CI Council, at a two hour meeting on Friday 26 June 2009.  Hence, it is a draft and should not be publicly distributed yet.  Before then you may like to look over it and if you have any comments they would be very gratefully received.  For example, I would be particularly interested to know:

(a) Does any of what we plan to do overlap with what others are doing, that you know of?

(b) Are there any compelling needs that we have missed in our work programme and should address?

Thanks in advance.