copyright

DJ's choice is a weekly section by GenderIT.org, exploring the depths of the web to provide you once a week with a top 5 of creative, interesting and informative pieces and resources on gender and ICTs. Delight yourself with this selection of “sparks”: Good readings, interesting links, videos, pictures, cool authors to point to, amazing tools, and much more. Send us interesting material to…

It's day two of the 'Informal' Asia Europe Foundation meeting on human rights and ICTs, and we're split up into workshops to discuss recommendations that will go to the Foundation's ministerial meeting in November: I'm in the workshop on digital divide. While a lot of interesting ideas came up during the course of the day, the one which causes me most concern is the problem of knowledge that is…

GenderIt writer Mavic Cabrera-Balleza interviewed Heather Ford, Founder of the African Commons Project, a South African NGO with the goal of mobilizing communities through active participation in collaborative technology. Ford has worked in the fields of internet policy, law and management in South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. She sheds light on some of these issues.

Copyright and patents legislation has spread rapidly over the past century. This has a particular impact on indigenous women and the holders of traditional knowledge, as copyright ignores the possibility that knowledge can be held communally and has definitions of knowledge that exclude information held in a spiritual context. In this article, GenderIT writer Sonia Randhawa examines how women's…

The UNAIDS 2008 report confirms that Sub-Saharan Africa continues to be the region most seriously affected by AIDS in the world. As part of the response to this pandemic, access to information and knowledge on HIV/AIDS is vital, as disease prevention depends heavily on information. In a world where there is a price to pay for access to knowledge, to what extent do patents and copyrights limit…

The idea of the 'commons' has been contestedly understood as being both a principle of understanding content and creative products, and a community that supports the sharing of information and creative content. It is also directly linked with subverting current Intellectual Property Rights paradigms, where ownership and control of information, knowledge, and content has been commodified. So what…