|
Getting to Ghana from Senegal wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be, and required switching planes (and airlines) in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire. I have to admit that the simmering unrest there made me a bit uncomfortable with the stopover. While landing, I wasn’t sure whether the soldiers holding AK47s alongside the runway made me more or less at ease with the idea. Well, Abidjan’s airport turned out to be among the most modern in West Africa, and the Emirates flight en route to Dubai dropped me off just fine in Accra. And Accra, let me tell you, is a fascinating place.
After an expedited trip through immigration (thanks to some strings pulled by the Ghanaian colleagues I was visiting), I was immediately struck by the volume of construction I saw going on. Hotels, roads, shopping malls; Ghana is getting it all. Some of this, I think, was thanks to the Cup of Nations hosted there this year. But beyond that I got the definite impression that Ghana is developing more quickly than the other places I visited. Hopefully, their upcoming elections go smoothly and don’t derail what seems to be one of Africa’s strongest economies at the moment.
The momentum apparent from Ghana’s growing economy and infrastructure is also evident in its copyright environment. The types of copyright challenges being encountered in Ghana are of a different degree than in Senegal, for instance. In Ghana, the hot topic for our research team seems to be collective administration and its impact on education.
One of our meetings was with the Managing Director (and only employee, as far as I could tell) of CopyGhana. The organization has been around for a while, but is just now beginning to have an impact in the Ghanian educational sector. Much of its capacity to operate is attributable to support from the International Federation of Reprographic Rights Organizations (IFRRO) and, quite to my surprise, KopiNor, the Norwegian reprography collective. (Kopinor is also very influential in Mozambique, Milawi and elsewhere, we later learned.)
During our conversation, it became apparent that blanket licensing through collectives has a lot of promise; it could eventually become a viable solution to the problems facing learners in Ghana. The upshot is that a system is being implemented to collect 2 Ghanian cedis (about US$2) per annum from roughly 130,000 tertiary students. That doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but having personally seen the university campus in Accra, I think the last thing they need to do is send a quarter million dollars in royalties straight out of the country every year.
More fundamentally, the problem seems to be that the Ghanians are being encouraged to adopt European licensing templates that clearly do not take into account the very different practices of Ghanian students. The blanket licence, for example, allows a student to copy only 15% of a particular title, which is very arguably fair dealing anyways. And besides that, the reality is that students routinely copy entire books because, like elsewhere in Africa, there aren’t enough copies in the library and purchasing the book is not feasible given the price. Now, having signed licenses and paid royalties just to do what is unrealistic and what would be fair dealing in any event, universities are opening themselves up for lawsuits on the basis of both copyright infringement and breach of contract. It doesn’t make any sense. Anyways, this is a topic we’ll hear more about as the Ghanaian team continues its work.
We were also lucky to sit on the team’s interview with the Copyright Administrator, who was both knowledgeable and passionate about the subject. The most interesting of the many insights I gleaned from this interview was just how influential and effective WIPO’s programme of “technical assistance” is. Despite the rhetoric of the Development Agenda, it is crystal clear that WIPO’s technical assistance programme remains exactly what it has been alleged to be: an evangelical mission to reveal the benefits of strong IP protection to officials from developing countries. Well, it is working.
The Ghanaian team is also doing great work by tackling the problem of access to learning materials in rural primary schools, as well as universities. That is sure to yield some interesting results for the comparative analysis.
Before telling you about my next stop, in Mozambique, I wanted to point out that in Ghana I experienced what was probably the most moving moment of the entire trip. It took place in the bowels of the Elmina castle, one of Africa’s oldest, largest and most notorious slave-trading posts. While standing in a small, dark dungeon starring through what looked like a window but was really a door, sensing the unspeakable atrocities committed there over hundreds of years, we were told how many of the slaves sent to North America and elsewhere passed through that exact spot. The shame was overwhelming. Experiences like that put the copyright project, important as it may be, into perspective.
Print | E-mail
Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register. Powered by AkoComment Tweaked Special Edition v.1.4.6
AkoComment © Copyright 2004 by Arthur Konze - www.mamboportal.com
All right reserved
|
