CI

Consumers International's African regional meeting on A2Kⁱ was held in Nairobi, Kenya on 23 April. It was attended by sixteen African members and partners, including the President of CIⁱ, 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 IPⁱ and A2K for the global consumer movement, to be presented at CI's Council meeting in June.

The first of Consumers International's regional meetings on Access to Knowledge, held this week in Kuala Lumpur, was a considerable success in establishing the programme of the global consumer movement for its work on intellectual property and A2Kⁱ over the next few years. In addition, the meeting served a valuable regional capacity building function, with over forty participants attending, thirteen of them giving presentations on the issues for consumers in their country around Access to Knowledge, communications rights and access to the Internet.

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Presentations

Programme

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 IPⁱ) protection in both domestic and international law - a trend which shows no signs of abating.