CI

Consumers International's World Congress 2011 will be held in Hong Kong from 3-6 May on the theme Empowering Tomorrow's Consumers. One of the sessions that will be of most interest to participants in the A2K programme is titled Consumer Rights in the Digital World: Privacy, access and activism

Consumers International's African regional meeting on A2K was held in Nairobi, Kenya on 23 April. It was attended by sixteen African members and partners, including the President of CI, Samuel Ochieng, all of whom participated actively. The meeting succeeded in raising important issues for consumers that even the previous two regional meetings had not covered. These will be consolidated with ideas raised at the previous two regional meetings in CI's strategic plan on IP and A2K for the global consumer movement, to be presented at CI's Council meeting in June.

The intellectual property system is often portrayed as a battleground in which the creators of content are pitted against lawless "counterfeiters" and "pirates". Multinational media companies have relied on this perception in order to push governments for stronger and yet stronger intellectual property (or IP) protection in both domestic and international law - a trend which shows no signs of abating.