As Africa continues to develop rapidly, Western countries and companies are increasingly interested in bringing it into existing international legal and commercial frameworks, but always on terms that maintain their dominance. One way of doing that is through intellectual monopolies: last year we wrote about proposals for a Pan-Africa Intellectual Property Organization (PAIPO), whose benefits for Africa seem dubious. Meanwhile, here's another plan that is being presented as a vital part of Africa's modernization process, and yet oddly enough seems to benefit giant Western companies most, as AllAfrica reports:

the proposal is to create a harmonised system of control around the presently fragmented African seed trade regime and create a system based on what is projected as modern best practice.

This includes uniform adherence to the strict 1991 Act of the International Union for the Protection of Plant Varieties (UPOV), across the board, for Africa. Because of the stringency of UPOV, the real impact of this will be the loss of control of the seed supply by indigenous small farmers. The consequences for food production and social cohesion across the continent will be dire.

The fear is that changes to how seeds are regulated will have major knock-on effects on African societies:

Once locally adapted seed varieties are lost, dependence on outside seed suppliers will rapidly become unaffordable. The implications will reverberate far beyond food production.

Indebted farmers are at direct risk of losing land tenure. On the one hand this causes accelerating urbanisation and social dislocation. On the other, good agricultural land is appropriated by large conglomerates. There is already a massive thrust by nations and corporations to gain land tenure in fertile tropical African agricultural zones.

It's well worth reading the rest of the article, which explores the continuing consolidation in the African seed industry, and how global giants like Monsanto hope to avoid some of the resistance they have experienced elsewhere in the developing world -- for example, in Brazil, discussed in Techdirt last year. As the AllAfrica article concludes:

If there was ever a time for the vocal proponents for African unity and values to step forward, it is now. Should they fail, African leadership will be harshly judged for enabling the next phase of neo-colonialism to unfold unopposed.

Unfortunately, given that PAIPO seems to be going ahead, despite major concerns about its lack of balance and transparency, the chances of the requisite African unity being achieved in order to stave off this latest attempt by the West to disadvantage the continent by locking it into inappropriate international structures look poor at the moment.

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As a recent post noted, net neutrality is under threat in France, with ISPs like Free asking Google to pay extra for delivery of its traffic. According to this post on the Forbes Web site, Google has already agreed to pay the French telecoms company Orange in precisely this way. As well as damaging the whole principle of net neutrality, something that Google has been championing for many years, this would seem to be a pretty bad business decision. After all, if Orange is now getting paid to carry Google's traffic, why shouldn't every other telecom company out there also receive money for delivering Google's services?

It turns out that there are some very specific reasons why Google might have taken this surprising step, as Forbes explains:

Orange have implied their strong market position in Africa provided them sufficient leverage in the discussions with Google.

The African market is currently making the switch from feature phones with limited data access, to low-cost smartphones that provide far greater access to the internet and web services. Low-cost smartphones that are predominantly powered by Android. Google wants the emerging market to be running their OS so they can effectively monetize the continent. What they don't want is another platform becoming established, such as Nokia's low-cost Windows Phones or the upcoming Blackberry 10 devices.

This is really about the African market, then. As the analysis above notes, Google wants Android to become established there as successfully as it has elsewhere in the world. If it had refused to do a deal with Orange, which is apparently a major player in this region, there was a danger that Nokia or RIM could have taken advantage of the situation. Even though the payment is nominally about Net traffic, it's probably really about Google keeping a dominant telecom company sweet.

In most other parts of the world, Android is already established as the leading smartphone platform, so Google won't need to make similar deals. That doesn't mean that telecoms and ISPs won't demand them, but their bargaining position will generally be much weaker than Orange's. Google will probably be able to refuse without risking too much, secure in the knowledge that Internet users won't be best pleased with their ISPs if they can't access Gmail, or YouTube becomes unbearably laggy.

But even if the Orange deal is a special case, it's still bad news for the Internet. Google has clearly signaled that net neutrality is not sacrosanct, and that it is quite prepared to abandon it when necessary.

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Back in May, Techdirt pointed to a presentation from Mike Palmedo listing a wide range of research that demonstrates the lack of a connection between policies introducing stricter IP laws or enforcement and economic growth or innovation. Apparently, the African Union Scientific, Technical and Research Commission didn't get around to reading that post, since it has produced a draft statute for the creation of a new Pan-Africa Intellectual Property Organization that seems based entirely on assuming this link exists.

Here's how Brook K. Baker, a US law professor specializing in this area, describes these plans over on infojustice.org:

The statute, drafted by true believers of IP-maximalist ideology, proposes to establish a region-wide intellectual property organization with the sole agenda of expanding IP rights, strengthening enforcement, harmonizing regional legislation, and eventually facilitating the granting of IP monopolies by a central granting authority that may well be legally binding on Member States.

One reason the proposal is so bad is that, once again, all the benefits flow to rightsholders at the expense of users:

Throughout the proposed legislation, there is not one reference to achieving a balance between the interests of rightholders and users of technology and creative endeavors. There is not a word on preserving permitted limitations or exceptions to IPRs or controlling misuse of IP monopolies. There is not a single commitment to withstanding pressures from the US and EU for ever expanding intellectual property rights that are longer, stronger and broader nor for the draconian enforcement obligations that suppress legitimate competition and impose costly border, criminal, and civil enforcement obligations on Africa taxpayers.

The draft will be considered at a meeting of African science and technology ministers in the Republic of Congo in November. If you want to read the details, the proposed text is available (as a Microsoft Word file) from the Intellectual Property Watch site.

It's particularly disappointing that this hugely retrogressive move should be proposed at a time when African innovation is really starting to take off, with a number of tech hubs emerging across the continent. The present proposals seem likely to throttle those exciting developments, because they will impose a neo-colonial IP framework on Africa that will see it ruthlessly exploited by Western companies thanks to their copyright and patent monopolies, just as its physical resources were expropriated in the 19th century.

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A couple weeks ago, we pointed to an absolutely ridiculous "Africa IP Forum" that was being organized by WIPO and the US Department of Commerce, where it appeared the entire event was around forcing extreme IP enforcement on Africa, despite plenty of evidence that developing nations, such as most of those in Africa, are hurt by such enforcement. The whole schedule was one-sided with speakers who mainly supported extreme enforcement over looking for the most reasonable overall solutions for different economies. After widespread outcry concerning this rather non-subtle attempt to export US-style copyright maximalism to the African continent, the US Commerce Department has announced that the event has been postponed.

The African Intellectual Property Forum, originally slated for April 3-5, 2012 in Cape Town, will be rescheduled. Organizers are committed to ensuring that all stakeholders – in government, private business, the arts and the development community – are represented and engaged in the conference organization and agenda.

The organizers apparently also sent emails to those who had registered, apologizing to people who had already made travel arrangements.

While it's nice that the Commerce Department has recognized that the original program was no good and that all stakeholders should be heard from -- it would have been much nicer and a hell of a lot more convincing if they had done so originally, rather than just a few weeks before the scheduled event when people started protesting...

We've noted a few times recently that over the last few years WIPO has at least appeared to be more receptive to views from developing nations that strict copyright and patent enforcement could do a lot more damage than good. There are actually tons of compelling economic evidence that developing countries are best off mostly ignoring IP laws as they grow. Hell, the US is example number one of a country that completely ignored foreign IP laws while it developed, much to its advantage. Of course, the US, which leads the developed countries these days, absolutely hates this concept and has taken a strong maximalist position that all countries must respect US IP laws (or go even further). A big part of the reason that ACTA was negotiated outside of WIPO was because WIPO was actually listening to countries like Brazil and India that were expressing concerns about over-enforcement and the harms it created.

However, WIPO itself has expressed concerns about this... but rather than working to convince the US that its approach is incorrect, it looks like WIPO may be going back in the other direction of supporting pure maximalism (i.e., the US agenda). Witness the ridiculous situation shaping up in Africa, where "WIPO" is organizing a "training" program about intellectual property that appears to have been entirely created by the US. It's scheduled to take place in South Africa in April, but it's strictly focused on enforcement and concepts that the US supports, rather than more reasoned issues about what countries in Africa actually need:

“It’s as if the last five years didn’t happen – no WIPO Development Agenda, no discussion on copyright limitations and exceptions, no proposals in favour of libraries and archives, education, blind and visually impaired people,” said Teresa Hackett, Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL). “But they did happen, and we will work to ensure that delegates attending the African IP Forum hear a diversity of opinion and perspective, and have the opportunity to debate these issues that are critically important to libraries in Africa and around the world.”

People discussing it note that this meeting doesn't appear to really be about effective intellectual property, but about setting the stage to force ACTA or ACTA-style agreements across Europe:

A particular concern of NGOs is that the conference will advance anti-counterfeiting legislation across Africa that will lead to damaging restrictions to the local populations and economies. They also raised alarm that the conference does not appear to include discussion on how to use the hard-won flexibilities that developing countries are allowed to employ so as not to apply IP rights if not in their national interest.

Furthermore, groups worried about this meeting note that the event is sponsored by private groups who have strong interests in greater IP enforcement, rather than the interests of what's best for various African nations. Among the sponsors is the International Chamber of Commerce's Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy (BASCAP). From that, it's pretty clear that the entire meeting's goals are suspect.

If there's going to be an effort by the international community to explore IP issues in Africa, the least they could do is acknowledge the fact that IP laws are supposed to be about what's best for the people, not what's best for big international corporations who want to maximize profit from African markets. But thanks to US involvement, that doesn't seem possible.

In recent months, a number of folks have argued that the arrival of high-speed bandwidth in Africa represents not an opportunity for economic growth, but a dangerous threat to the world. According to these Western pundits who are, incidentally, often promoting their cybersecurity services, computers and connectivity in Africa either pave the way for terrorists to unleash cyber-attacks or for botnet operators to gather millions of unprotected machines into their control. Although we've spent considerable time debunking the hysteria around cyberwar, this new version of the meme is even more unfounded.

Worrying that Africa is going to start producing top-notch hackers in any great quantity seems pretty absurd, when we're talking about a continent where basic literacy, not to mention programming prowess, is a challenge. When Franz-Stefan writes in one of the articles above, that "skillful cybercriminals operating out of an unregulated Internet cafe in the slums of Addis Ababa, Lagos, or Maputo" will create the world's biggest botnets, he shows that he has little understanding of those "slums." For starters, electricity is intermittent enough to make cyberwar a sputtering failure. Secondly, although there are pockets of terrorists on the continent, by and large, elsewhere terrorists have access to far better finances and bandwidth than their comrades in Mogadishu. The fact that those terrorists haven't used the Internet for these types of attacks with any regularity suggests that they place far more faith in tried-and-true methods of terrorizing, and there is every reason to believe that those in Africa will be the same.

Finally, as Miquel Hudin points out, it is ridiculous (and very likely offensive) to think that Africans are any more likely to keep their PCs insecure than anyone else. An American or European who points to Africa as the source of infected botnet computers is wildly hypocritical considering the enormous number of insecure computers that wealthy, educated Westerners have in their homes and offices. It seems quite unlikely that African computers are any more insecure than elsewhere.

Frantic articles painting Africa as just another threat, especially with regard to a great opportunity for the continent - connectivity - are reckless and miss both on-the-ground context and level-headed responses to the challenges of the continent.

Shocklee points us to an odd, totally unsubstantiated article by a University of Southern Illinois professor insisting that "piracy" is creating tremendous harm to West African content industries. This goes against numerous studies, including those by the WTO on how developing nations often should have less stringent intellectual property laws while they're developing. The article is based on some simple conjectures: that even with low budgets, films made in Nigeria are having trouble making money and it's all the fault of piracy -- first from lost sales, but also because people are pirating high budget American films as well. Basically, the argument is that if people can get those high budget films at the same "pirated" cost as local films, of course they'll go for the high budget films, and thus destroy the local film industry.

Of course, that assumes that in the absence of "piracy" prices to see foreign films or to buy their DVDs scale relative to their budget. That's simply not true. Movie tickets and DVD prices do not scale based on the budget of the movie. The professor doesn't seem to mention the fact that most films (especially the low budget kind) struggle to make money in the first place. He just assumes that it's because of piracy. He neglects to mention that there are plenty of business models beyond selling DVDs. He does mention that people seem to prefer local content, but then ignores that in his very next sentence, saying that local content "can't compete." Even though he just said that the market demands local content.

We report on so many stories where technology is used in bad or oppressive ways, that it's important to note when it's being used in positive ways as well. Technology, itself, is just a tool that can be used in both good and bad ways (not to mention neutral ways), but somehow the good ways don't always get as much attention. CNN has an article detailing how the rise of mobile phones throughout Africa is helping in making elections that are more fair. It's certainly not perfect yet, but the ability to communicate has allowed citizens to report abuses of the election process and get the word out when they see any kind of cheating happening.