and more importantly free our kids. The details of this initiative are quite shocking, but then again why am I not surprised by the Department of education http://www.education.gov.za/dynamic/dynamic.aspx?pageid=310&id=8553
I have resigned from my position with the government of South Africa and have joined Sun Microsystems. I will be working on the global government strategy and communities team.
I blogged about the joint seminar for capacity development on Intellectual property hosted by DST, WIPO and JICA earlier. We had the some of the top experts in the country as well as some international guests, and even an IP lawyer or two. Well what came out of the conference are the following recommendations and conclusions which have been sent on to the powers that be.
The Participants recognised that the stimulation of innovation is crucial for South Africa.
Government support for innovation in science and technology is primarily to address the needs of the people of South Africa.
Government support extends to the provision of funds for engaging in research or developing new ideas, and for the provision of the infra-structure needed to conduct the research.
Intellectual property includes a wide range of information and know-how. The range of IP includes ‘know-how’, trade-secrets, industrial designs, trade-marks, plant variety rights, copyrights, geographical indications and patents. Most of these need registration, others, like copyright, provide automatic cover once expressed in ‘writing’.
Innovation should be stimulated through interaction with others within and without South Africa, particularly in relation to new science and technologies. New discoveries in science and technology are most often the result of large consortia across the world working together to enhance the basic knowledge that leads to innovation. This is especially true for advances in ‘new’ sciences – Information sciences, technology and database design, biotechnology, genetics, nanotechnology and synthetic biology are examples.
Indigenous knowledge systems and designs are intellectual property and an alternative system to ensure their protection needs to be urgently put in place over and above the protection that is provided by the current legislation and common law.
We need to recognise that there are many criticisms of the IP system, recognised within South Africa, and that ‘open-source’ systems in IT and modern genetics, which are not currently addressed through the new IPR Act, may be as effective as the traditional IP system in encouraging innovation.
There are some areas of basic science research (like the human genome project, and open standards for interoperability i.e. ODF) that are recognised by the international community to be of such importance that they should be placed in the public domain. South Africa has contributed to some of the work within these fields. There is widespread concern that the current legislation would dissuade the international community from collaborating with SA.
Nevertheless, in many areas of endeavour, the copyright and patent system are important in encouraging innovation in that they enable the availability of venture capital and therefore the exploitation of the ‘know-how’ or IP.
It was recognised that the current patent system in South Africa needs substantial reform. It must be open and searchable by all. It is currently a ‘registration’ system that is harming innovation in South Africa. A system for ensuring that new innovation is patentable, including a search system prior to grant is crucial. Collaboration with other patent-granting authorities will be important to developing the South African System. The meeting therefore welcomed the input and advice of the Japanese colleagues at the seminar.
The mandate of Government is to improve the lives of its citizens. The exploitation of IP should be considered in the widest sense and firstly for the social good and not only in terms of financial and commercial exploitation.
The regulations under the new (or forthcoming) legislation for the protection of Intellectual Property in South Africa need to take account of the points made above.
The workshop recognised that introduction of the current legislation is only one step towards creating an IP environment that provides considerably greater levels of encouragement in SA for both the development and the exploitation of innovation for the good of all its citizens: It will also be necessary to align future legislation and related regulations (including that related to the structure and organisation of the various implementation and regulatory bodies) to this. Government’s capacity to effectively implement, monitor and enforce IP related legislation will also be critical to achieving the desired goals.
Government needs to be open to ongoing dialogue with stakeholders, particularly in terms of the development of regulations and the implementation of the new legislation, in order to avoid unintended negative consequences and to improve buy-in and early compliance.
Government support for IP development and its exploitation through innovation needs to be seen as an ‘all of government’ initiative and applicable to all South African sectors: The cross-cutting nature of IP as one aspect successful innovation needs to be recognised.
Related to the above, the various government departments should develop education initiatives for their sectors, with content focussing on the importance of understanding, and compliance with, IP legislation in that sector.
International assistance with regard to achieving the above mentioned objectives is available. To ensure that South Africa’s and Africa’s concerns and needs in these fields are properly articulated and addressed in international fora ,it is crucial that relevant SA stakeholders be consulted before any international negotiations in order to agree and receive approval of an official SA position; and that sub-regional and regional preparatory consultations are then held in order to agree African common positions. The same applies mutatis mutandis to approaches for bilateral assistance such as that provided by JICA, NITE, WIPO etc.
The international collaboration commenced at this seminar between Japan, WIPO and South Africa is strongly welcomed by all participants and South African participants expressed their hope that it will continue and culminate in practical collaboration and projects.
Picked up on the article http://tinyurl.com/ajh32f by Brain Kahin thanks to simon, Brian is a Senior Fellow at the Computer & Communications Industry Association in Washington
It does raise the question for me about what we should be doing about propreitary file formats. After spending some time ensuring open standards for our documents, do we need to start paying attention to filesystems. the question is what should government do, if anything at all.
Busy preparing for Friday’s meeting on procurement. There are lots of good documents to refer to, so putting together a procurement guideline should not be too difficult. One challenge that we will not overcome through this process is Procurement dressed up as a partnership. We have seen many state agencies enter into deals where they initially receive software at no charge for a year or two and then are expected to pay for it. The department or agency is locked into the product by then. Hopefully those departments will look at the guidelines even when they are approached with “free” software.
I am attending the SITA FOSS workshop for CIO’s.
it has been interesting so far,
PROGRAMME
2nd ANNUAL CIO WORKSHOP
DATE: 25 February 2009
Venue:
08:30 Registration and refreshments
09:30 Opening remarks
10:00 FOSS Implementation proposals
10:30 Government Wide Enterprise Architecture
11:00 PANEL DISCUSSION:
Migration experiences: Institutions in at different stages of migration were invited tobe part of the panel that will discuss their experiences.
11:30 Tea break
12:00 FOSS stack in SITA’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO)
12:20 PANEL DISCUSSION:
ECM: SITA’s implementation of ECM, Alfresco Pilot
programme at DST, and Meeting National Archives criteria
13:00 Lunch
14:00 FOSS Skills Development
14:20 Role to be played by the FOSS centres of expertise
14:50 Feedback on questionnaires completed
15:15 Closure
For those that may be interested in following up on this, the error I got is pasted below. Unfortunately, no xforms.
————————————————————————————————-
To view the full contents of this document, you need a later version of the PDF viewer. You can upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Reader from www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html For further support, go to www.adobe.com/support/products/acrreader.html
I received an email with a link to this news article
[ http://www.fsfeurope.org/news/2009/news-20090202-01 ]
“Interoperability, competition and choice are primary benefits of Open
Standards that translate into vendor-independence and better value for
money for customers,” says FSFE president Georg Greve. “Although many
versions of PDF offer all these benefits for formatted text and
documents, files in PDF formats typically come with information that
users need to use a specific product. pdfreaders.org provides an
alternative to highlight the strengths of PDF as an Open Standard.”
It was interesting that I was recently on the south african revenue services e-filing site and I was unable to use my pdf reader (evince) to access the forms on the site. In fact they state, “All income tax returns (IT12S, IT12C, IT12TR, IT12EI and IT14) will be made available in an electronic format using freely available Adobe software.”
no, I am not going to be writing any letters soon.
Often independent computer industry associations are never that, so one often reads their reports with more then a healthy dose of scepticism. Having spent some time last week at an ip conference it was quite useful to find this report from the CCIA http://www.ccianet.org ( thanks thiru).
http://www.wipo.int/scp/en/meetings/session_13/pdf/ccia.pdf
CCIA Comments on the WIPO Report on the International Patent System
The Computer & Communications Industry Association wishes to commend
WIPO for undertaking this report for the Standing Committee on Patents. This
synthesis of current conditions and issues is a landmark first step in reorienting
WIPO towards further understanding of how intellectual property functions in the
global economy and how patent law regimes can be improved or reformed to
better meet agreed-on goals. We believe that WIPO should take a leadership
role in integrating economic and legal analysis in collaboration with other
organizations that show a genuine commitment to disinterested research and
analysis. We hope that WIPO will build capacity both in-house and in engaging
the broader community of researchers and stakeholders.
We offer the following on this initial report in the spirit of assembling a more
coherent common understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the patent
system. We mean “system” in a broader sense, not just as a collection laws and
bureaucracies, but as an economic tool employed by economic actors that
should lead to economically beneficial outcomes.
With this in mind, we focus on a set of issues that would benefit from closer
attention. The central theme here is the fact that there are substantial
differences among different technologies – and thereby different industries - in
how patents are used and experienced. CCIA’s experience centers on
information technology and its applications, so we have a special concern for
some issues that may not be seen as troublesome in other areas. We believe
that the report needs shed light on these problems and the tensions increasingly
apparent within a one-size-fits-all patent system (especially since these tensions
are thwarting a major effort at patent reform in the United States). We also note
that the European Patent Office’s (EPO) Scenarios Project recognizes many of
these challenges in the “Blue Skies” Scenario.
In many respects, these differences revolve around the structural differences
between complex-product technologies such as information technology and
discrete-product technologies, such as pharmaceuticals and chemicals. Under
present standards, complex products may include thousands of patentable
functions or components, while a discrete product may be protected by a single
primary patent. Accordingly, information technology is characterized by large
numbers of relatively low-value patents while pharmaceuticals are characterized
by a smaller number of high-value patents.
Thus demand for patents appears to be very high in information technology, but
in fact patents play a far lesser role than they do in pharmaceuticals. IT
companies want “freedom to operate” in order to build complex products and
services without being blocked by the many patents that belong to others. They
assemble large portfolios to be used defensively if and when they are threatened
with infringement actions by competitors. This deterrent effect is reminiscent of a
nuclear arms race, and is often referred to as “mutually assured destruction.”
Large companies commonly cross-license with each other, often with balancing
payments to adjust for the size of their respective portfolios. Cross-licensing is
problematic for a field like software, however, where there are a large number of
different-sized, differently-situated companies.
From a policy perspective, the evolution of the patent “portfolio” as the relevant
frame of reference (as opposed to the individual patent) is likely to discourage
new entrants. Conventional wisdom says that patents protect startup companies
– and within a narrow ambit, this may still be true. But a startup that wants to
develop fully functional products (rather than just technology to license to others)
will need access to the patents of others, possibly large numbers of patents. In
that respect, portfolios serve as barriers to entry for newcomers while reinforcing
the market positions of incumbents.
The high volume of patents in complex-product technologies such as IT creates
fertile ground for a major problem: non-practicing entities, commonly referred to
as “trolls.” The troll problem has several dimensions that need further
explanation
First, portfolio-driven demand, especially when combined with low inventive-step
standards and inadequate patent office review, results in large numbers of trivial
or questionable patents. This diminishes the value of patent information in IT
and ultimately make product clearances prohibitively expensive. As a
consequence, patents are ignored unless the patent owner asserts them. Thus,
independent invention is commonplace, and inadvertent infringement is the
inevitable result. (Recent empirical research shows that copying is rare in patent
litigation, and especially rare in IT.) This is especially problematic for software,
where the high search, information, and transactions associated with clearance
simply overwhelm the relatively low cost of authoring software.
The discussion of patent information in the report is especially deficient in this
respect. This section is lacking in documentation and expresses unsubstantiated
faith in the usefulness of patent information without differentiating among fields.
In fact, the virtual opacity of the information environment in IT creates
opportunities for arbitrage. Trolls can assert what were once low-value patents
against companies that produce complex products that may inadvertently
incorporate the trivial technology covered by the patents. The longer the troll
waits, the more fully the technology is adopted and embedded, the more
leverage the troll has. The leverage reaches an extreme in the case of standards
embedded in products all across an industry. This extreme vulnerability also
needs to be brought out in the discussion of standards and patents.
The development of markets for technology hailed in the report has a major
downside in that patents are often most valuable in hands of trolls. When
companies fail – as most startups do – patents are sold off as the remaining
assets. These patents enter patent markets where they can be acquired
knowing or speculating that they are being infringed by someone somewhere.
Finally, the discussion of subject matter gives short shrift to the patentability of
computer programs, which continues to provoke legal, economic, and political
controversy. Much of the controversy can explained as extreme version of the
problem set faced by IT generally, but in some ways software is unique:
Copyright is available for software, which may further diminish the value of
patents, and copyright appears to fit better with the high degree of simultaneous
innovation that takes place in software. Only software is suited to open source
models of development and distribution. For this reason, standards
organizations focused on information and software standards (W3C, OASIS)
prefer royalty-free licensing since it does not discriminate against open source
models.
Much of the global economy is dependent on IT. It is important that WIPO
members understand the economic dynamics around patents in information
technology – including the possible solutions to the problems they present. To
recapitulate, these include:
differences among technologies, especially between complex and discrete
products
conflict between standards and patents
direct costs, distorted incentives, and unintended effects created by
portfolio practices
the limited value of patent information in an overheated patent
environment
the destructive potential of patent arbitrage against producers and service
providers
the extent to which software should be patentable subject matter
Considerably more could be said about patents and standards, but since that has
been designated one of four priority areas for future work, we will furnish detailed
comments once plans are made public.
We would be happy to furnish references and further explanations for these
comments. Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to this much-needed
agenda.
The DTI, Mr M. Netshitenzhe asks what is the community benefit for granting patents.
