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Copyright: a roadblock to education in developing countries?
Copyright protection is intended to promote creativity by granting the creator of an original work, exclusive rights to its use for a limited time period. However, there has been a growing debate about whether copyright laws and their strict implementation, particularly in developing countries, coul...
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AUC Knowledge Fountain
2013
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| Summary: | Copyright protection is intended to promote creativity by granting the creator of an original work, exclusive rights to its use for a limited time period. However, there has been a growing debate about whether copyright laws and their strict implementation, particularly in developing countries, could be detrimental to efforts by these countries to promote access to knowledge in general, and to educational material in particular. This debate, though not entirely new, is taking place in the context of intense policy discussions since the late 1990s about the impact of global intellectual property rules, such as those of the WTO TRIPS Agreement, on developing countries and about the extent to which such rules are supportive of public policy objectives in areas crucial to achieving sustainable development such as health, education and the environment. This paper examines the relationship between copyright protection and access to educational material. In this context, it looks, in particular, at the role of limitations and exceptions to copyright which in principle seek to reconcile both the interest of rights holders and public interest but whose implementation in practice has proved challenging in a number developing of countries. The paper seeks to identify options that will enable developing countries to formulate national copyright regimes that give priority to access to knowledge in the form of educational material. |
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