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 second of CIⁱ's regional meetings on A2Kⁱ took place on 30 and 31 March in Santiago, Chile. The meeting was conducted in English and Spanish, through the use of simultaneous interpretation. Its participants included twenty representatives of CI members and like-minded NGOs from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Peru, as well as a special guest from the UK.

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.

The project's governance structure incorporates three bodies: a Steering Committee, an Advisory Group of experts, and a Member Working Group, overseen and coordinated by the project secretariat:

• The Steering Committee is responsible for overseeing the work of the project, including agreeing on an appropriate strategy and putting into place work plans to deliver the strategy and monitor the work of the working group and project secretariat.

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• This Web site is part of the Global Consumer Dialog and Public Education Network on Access to Knowledge (A2Kⁱ) Issues funded by Ford Foundation. Through regional meetings and online dialogue, the Global Consumer Dialogue will identify problems consumers face in accessing and using copyrightⁱ protected materials, highlighting access barriers that require further investigation, identifying the legitimate needs of artists and content creators, and reframing enforcement debates to advance member groups’ economic, political, and cultural in

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.