The Ancient Library of Alexandria, of course, was envisioned and created in the 3rd century B.C. to provide the Egyptian people with abundant access to learning materials, a mandate that the Bibliotheca strives to fulfill to today. This uniquely situates Egypt to be a world leader in promoting access to knowledge, a cause apparently championed by Egyptian First Lady Suzanne Mubarak.
Egypt also has a fascinating legal history, which has recently melded a civilian system influenced by the French with common law concepts introduced by the English. As you can imagine, that makes for an interesting copyright environment.
Moreover, Egypt is perfectly positioned as an ACA2K study country, given its location at the intersection of Africa and Arabia. Practically speaking, this means that policies modeled in Egypt have the potential to influence behaviour not only in Northern and other parts of Africa, but also throughout the Arabic-speaking countries of the Middle East.
Egypt is home to an extraordinary group of copyright experts, some of whom I’m working with on the project, and some of whom I met for the first time during my visit. Given that expertise, it isn’t surprising that Egypt is playing an increasingly significant role in global intellectual property policy debates, especially at WIPO in the context of the Development Agenda. Hopefully Egypt can continue to show leadership in this regard.
I ended up spending more time than anticipated in Cairo thanks to a crash course in bureaucracy offered by various embassies. The trouble was obtaining a visa for my co-investigator on the project, Dick Kawooya, to enter Morocco. After several days of trying unsuccessfully to get the proper paperwork, it became clear we were going to have to reschedule the visit to Casablanca and reroute directly to Dakar. (Well, indirectly via Paris, actually; intra-continental travel in Africa isn’t yet as simple as it should be.) That’s where I’ll pick up in my next post.
