Roundtable III: Educational Innovation in Africa and Beyond

The speakers on this panel were Coetzee Bester, Jacques du Plessis, Dick Kawooya, Andrew Rens and Philipp Schmidt.

­­­Andrew Rens kicked off the discussion.  He began by talking about the evolution of education.  The industrial revolution brought with it an industrial model of education.  Now the digital revolution has altered the way education occurs.  He closed his introduction by asking whether we should want education to be governed as a commons.

Coetzee Bester spoke next.  He discussed the objectives of teaching information ethics in Africa.  Two of the greatest challenges to education innovation in Africa are staggering poverty and a public health crisis.  About 50% of the 900 million people on the African continent live on less than $1 per day.  Illiteracy and lack of access to information and technology further hinder education innovation.  There is also a brain drain of skilled people leaving Africa.  Leaders are working towards extending bandwidth and expanding access to Internet services.  The Africa Network for Information Ethics (ANIE) offers a promising opportunity to improve access to knowledge.

Jacques Du Plessis was the next speaker.  He talked about his project, www.openlanguages.net, which is a world-wide collaboration to develop open learning of less commonly-taught languages.  He wants to bring cohesion—“one-stop shopping”—to online education.  He thinks that NGOs, corporations and governments should collaborate on this effort.  He believes that one problem with OpenCourseWare is that it is fragmented.  He supports an education model in which the two roles of schools, the teaching of skills and the verification of skills, can exist independently.  Students should be allowed to demonstrate their skills at an institution without necessarily having to learn those skills at the same institution. 

Philipp Schmidt was the panel’s final speaker.  He runs a project called Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) which is an online learning community based on peer learning principles (http://p2pu.org).  Everything is completely free and open and most things are run by volunteers.  Although P2PU is not an accredited institution, it awards “badges” and is building pathways to formal credit.  Philip closed by describing how P2PU has been successful at innovating around barriers.

Roundtable IV: Accessing Legal Information

The panelists were Mariya Bedeva-Bright, Tom Bruce, Ivan Mokanov, Isabelle Moncion, Darrel Pink and Daniel Poulin.

The panelists talked about making legal information more easily accessible to the public.  Isabelle Moncion spoke about how LexUM had hoped JuriBurkina and JuriNiger would become a one-stop access point to Burkina Faso and Niger’s legal information.  She described how JuriBurkina and JuriNiger did not live up to expectations because they were not “comprehensive, one-stop and up-to-date.”  These are the three attributes users of online legal resources desire.

Daniel Poulin discussed how the availability of legal information in West Africa has significantly improved over the last five to ten years.  Three factors can help explain this change.  The first factor is the desire of the people and the institutions of the countries involved to meet the requirements for good governance and transparency of their various development partners.  The second factor is the rapid growth of the Internet and the sudden availability of an entire generation of free and open technologies.  The third factor is the model provided by a multitude of free content initiatives on the Internet, especially the Free Access to Law Movement.  

Ivan Mokanov talked about measuring the success of Free Access to Law initiatives.  Understanding the impact of free access to law on the competence of lawyers leads to some important questions: Are lawyers more competent in terms of services rendered and time spent on issues?  Have legal information websites facilitated and improved the work of lawyers?  Has the quality of legal services improved, leading to improved access to justice?

Ivan then passed the microphone to Mariya Bedeva-Bright.  Mariya discussed the need to build sustainable institutions that can provide free online access to legal materials.  The primary objective of the African Legal Information Institute (African LII) is to start a conversation and develop strategies leading towards financially, technically and organizationally sustainable free access to law operations that would be able to carry the free distribution of the law for many years.  A vital component of this path to sustainability is advocating for the entrenchment of free access to law principles across the continent which would result in deregulation in restrictive regimes and regulation or policy towards facilitating public access.

Next up was Darrel Pink.  He spoke about how the rule of law and fundamental principles of democracy require access to legal information.  However, mere access is not enough.  The law must also be presented in a way that is useful to average individuals.  Given the exponential growth in the amount of law affecting people in both developed and developing countries, those who disseminate it face enormous barriers to making law meaningful to citizens.  Whether it is the eleven official languages in South Africa or the low levels of literacy in other countries, those who create and disseminate legal information must recognize that the simple publication of what lawmakers or judges create does little to achieve the goals of the free access to law movement.

Tom Bruce spoke about the public interest in making legal information easily accessible to everybody.  The problem is that there are differences of opinion about who “everybody” is, and about the precise nature of the need.  Before the Internet revealed broader (and deeper) needs, “everybody” mostly meant “lawyers”, or it meant “the general public as lawyers imagine it to be”, which is to say, people having traumatic encounters with the legal system.  As in many other areas where the Internet has aggregated previously‐fragmented audiences into significant groups, it has gathered an audience of non‐lawyer professionals.  These are people who make continuous use of law for professional purposes but are not lawyers.  There are a lot of them.  Police officers are the first example anyone thinks of, but it is perhaps more useful to contemplate hospital managers using public‐benefits law, engineering managers in IP‐intensive companies, or indeed about anyone whose buying or selling or operations are regulated by the state. 

Question from the audience: Whose responsibility is it to make the law accessible to the public?

Darrel Pink: In many parts of the world, publishing law is subversive and governments don’t have a desire to make law publicly accessible.  So even though the government should be responsible for publishing law, it often cannot be expected to do this.  The responsibility of making law freely accessible to the public should be shared by four entities: the legal profession, courts, government and civil society.

Tom Bruce: Finding the right actors to make law more accessible depends on the specific factual circumstances within each country.  In the US, private industry is highly involved in publishing legal information and the government facilitates this private market.  This model, however, may be difficult to replicate in some countries.       

Roundtable VI: ICTs and Access in the Developing World

The panelists were Carlos Affonso, Marilia Maciel, Fikremarkos Mersos and Hong Xue.

Fikremarkos Mersos talked about the state of ICTs in Ethiopia and the digital divide.  Ethiopia, with about 80 million residents, is one of 49 “least developed” countries.  Ethiopia is a late comer to ICT but it has instituted an ambitious policy framework of providing affordable ICTs to individuals, households and businesses.  There has been substantial growth in the last 5 years but the figures for Ethiopian Internet, mobile and fixed telephone subscriptions and broadband access are disappointing.  The market structure for ICT is a public monopoly.  The problems in the ICT sector include: a backward ICT infrastructure; lack of access; high access costs; law quality of access; a digital divide between cities and rural areas; diverse local languages, scripts and dialects; lack of skilled manpower in ICT; and illiteracy.  The government has embarked on very ambitious ICT projects including Woredanet (linking 631 districts to a national data center), Schoolnet (connecting secondary schools to the Internet), Ethernet (connecting 13 public universities to the Internet), Agrinet and Healthnet.  There is a major public debate over the wisdom of having the government retain monopoly control over the ICT market.  Ethiopia recently signed a two-year management contract with France Telecom.  Some people hope that WTO membership will lead to liberalization of the ICT market and open the sector to greater competition and access.

Carlos Affonso then presented on the Brazilian experience using the Internet to promote a more democratic legislative process.  Brazilians created a civil rights framework for the Internet—they framed the topic of Internet activity as a civil rights issue.  There was an organized online effort to provide commentary on proposed Internet legislation that, among other things, would criminalize a host of typical online practices.  A popular movement developed to push for greater civil rights and Internet freedom.  This movement received support from individuals from all over Brazil as well as the world.  Carlos said that public participation on technical debates requires not only the given expertise of the participants, but also a certain degree of capacity building and mobilization. 

Marilia Maciel detailed copyright law reform in Brazil.  Brazilian copyright policy is governed by the Ministry of Culture.  The Ministry of Culture has gained importance during the presidency of Lula.  Minister Gilberto Gil and his successor, Juca Ferreira, put forth several policies which aim to foster digital culture such as Pontos de Cultura, Fórum de Cultura Digital and Fórum de Mídia Livre.  The government also gave support to alternative licensing models, such as creative commons, and fostered the use of free software in governmental bodies.  Over the years there has been steady pressure on the Brazilian government to reform copyright law to make it more A2K-friendly.  The Ministry of Culture has made a concerted effort to enable citizens to provide feedback on copyright law.  For an English translation of the proposed copyright reform legislation, see http://www.a2kbrasil.org.br/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/brazilian_copyright_bill_consolidated_june_2010.pdf.  The discussion about the draft proposal was carried out in a very democratic way.  The text was made available on an online platform that allowed users to comment on and debate each paragraph.  The public comments were then summarized and sent to Congress late last year.  Marilia talked about continuing copyright reform through a project called International IP and the Public Interest.  For information about this project, visit www.infojustice.org. 

The recent presidential election of Dilma Rousseff, the candidate supported by Lula, seemed to be positive for Brazilian copyright reform.  However, she appointed a new Ministry of Culture, Mrs. Ana de Hollanda, whose initial position has been that the draft text of the copyright reform legislation needs to be reviewed and re-discussed.  In the face of this threat to copyright reform, members of the Brazilian civil society have prepared a letter to the new Minister of Culture urging her to continue the reform process and submit the text to Congress.  The letter is open for signatures at the following address: http://culturadigital.br/cartaaberta/.

Switching gears and winding up the discussion, Hong Xue presented her analysis of IP rights in China.  Hong is Director of the Institute for Internet Policy & Law at Beijing Normal University (http://wiki.iipl.org.cn/).    

Roundtable VII: A2K, Privacy, and Freedom of Expression

The speakers on this panel were Jack Balkin, Laura DeNardis and Bryan Choi.

Laura DeNardis spoke about the privatization of Internet governance and regulation of freedom of expression.  Internet governance can be divided into 5 areas: design of Internet protocols; control of critical Internet resources; communication rights; intellectual property rights; and Internet security and infrastructure management.  Laura introduced some key concepts from her forthcoming book Technologies of Dissent.  She discussed different conceptions of dissent in online contexts.  Rather than attach a normative meaning to dissent, she recognizes that dissent can have positive and negative effects and that it is culturally specific.  Laura then discussed how private industry is playing an increasing role in preserving free expression.  She focused on corporate action at the infrastructure level.   She mentioned the importance of private sector Internet backbone peering agreements and talked about the anti-trust concerns as well as the possibility of government censorship.  Laura identified deep packet inspection as another area where there is privatization of freedom of expression.  She concluded her remarks by pointing out that regardless of the interests at stake, there is always a tension between interoperability/openness and control/proprietary systems.

Bryan Choi talked about anonymity and identity.  He began by pointing out that there is actually some overlap between these two ostensibly opposing concepts.  Anonymity has been said to promote truth, alter the perception of speakers and increase the quantity of participation.  Disclosure, on the other hand, has been said to promote truth as well, assemble reputational data and improve the quality of participation.  In the area of privacy, anonymity supports contextual identities and protects the exercise of unpopular activities while disclosure curtails the “society of strangers,” facilitates sharing of information and cultivates open tolerance of differences.  Bryan ended by suggesting that a healthy approach to anonymity in any context is to ask how much is necessary.  Laura noted that anonymity is not absolute on the Internet.  For instance, even though Internet users may be anonymous to each other, IP addresses can identify individuals to ISPs and the government.

Jack Balkin talked about WikiLeaks.  He pointed out that although Bradley Manning, the Army Corporal who leaked classified information to WikiLeaks, had a duty not to disclose this information, Julian Assange had a strong First Amendment claim to be able to publish it.  The Espionage Act, the WWI-era criminal statute under which the US sought to prosecute Assange, is rather ill-suited to the task of responding to WikiLeaks.  Jack then discussed how media policy relates to the debate over WikiLeaks.  The US has a transnational media policy—it wants to assert its influence over the media in other countries.  WikiLeaks poses a threat to this policy.  Assange also has a transnational media policy.  Jack compared him to Radio Free Europe.  Finally, Jack spoke about how new technologies like WikiLeaks can affect professional norms in the media.  When new media technologies arise, users redefine the norms of professionalism.

February 11-13, 2010 at Yale Law School

This conference seeks to lay the groundwork – conceptual and strategic – to build bridges between the A2K and human rights communities pursuing common goals of promoting greater access to knowledge, culture, technology and tools for innovation worldwide.

Conference Organizing Partners include:

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Film Screening and Panel Discussion

Friday, February 12, 2010

Welcome and Opening Remarks

Panel I. Perspectives on Access to Knowledge and Human Rights

Panel II. Technologies of Dissent: Information and Expression in a Digital World

Panel III. The Right to Health: Promoting Innovation and Equity

Panel IV. The Right to Education: Realizing the Potential of Digital Tools

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Panel V. Freedom to Innovate: Knowledge, Technology, Culture

Panel VI. The Right to Science and Culture: Participation and Access

VII. Concurrent Workshops

Identifying Challenges & Opportunities for an African Information Ethics

The Right to Read: Copyright and Access for Persons with Disabilities

The Right to Development: Bridging the Gap between Human Rights & IP?

Panel VIII. Rights-Based Strategies for Advancing Access to Knowledge

Click any of  the links above for A2K4 panel descriptions, photos, summaries, video archives, and additional resources.

For more information about the conference, visit: A2K4: Access to Knowledge & Human Rights

Sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union Women’s Rights Project, the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut, the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, and the YLS Law and Health Initiative.

www.inthefamilyfilm.com

At 31, filmmaker Joanna Rudnick faces an impossible decision: remove her breasts and ovaries or risk incredible odds of developing cancer.

Armed with a positive genetic test result that leaves her essentially ‘a ticking time bomb’, she balances dreams of having her own children with the unnerving reality that she is risking her life by holding on to her fertility. In The Family follows Joanna as she takes us on a journey through the unpredictable world of predictive genetic testing.

Turning the camera on herself, Joanna bares her conflicting emotions about preventative surgery and the potential consequences. Turning the camera on her new relationship, she and her partner capture a young couple falling in love in the shadow of the mutation. Turning the camera on the company that owns the patents to the BRCA genes, she questions their control over access to the test. Along the way, she looks to other women and families dealing with the same unbelievable information.

Intensely personal and timely, In The Family is a groundbreaking investigation that attempts to answer the question: How much do you sacrifice to survive?

EVENT DESCRIPTION

The screening will be followed by a panel discussion addressing the implications of gene patents for access to health care. Refreshments will be served. Panelists include:

Christopher Mason, Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University

Ellen Matloff, Genetic counselor and plaintiff in the breast cancer gene patent challenge

Sandra Park, ACLU Women’s Rights Project Attorney

Ady Barkan, Yale Law School

This event is a collaboration with P.O.V., PBS’ award-winning nonfiction film series; more information available at http://www.pbs.org/pov/.

COMMENTS ON FILM

Interlaced with the personal stories of women with the genetic predisposition for breast and ovarian cancer are interviews with the scientists who discovered the link between BRCA1 and BRCA2 and cancer.

At one point, filmmaker Joanna Rudnick interviews the founder Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Myriad, Dr. Mark Skolnick. Myriad Genetics is the biopharmaceutical company that owns the patent to BRCA1 and BRCA2, two genes that help determine a patient’s risk of developing breast cancer and ovarian cancer.

One of Dr. Skolnick comments elicited a particularly strong reaction from the viewing audience here at Yale. In response to Joanna’s suggestion that the BRCA1 patent was Myriad’s most controversial, Dr. Skolnick  stated, “There is no controversial patent. It is all very easy to understand if you take the time.”

Later, after Joanna questioned her further about whether genes that exist in nature should be patented, Dr. Skolnick asserted, “I guarantee you [women] would not be being tested if it weren’t for Myriad … We’ve taken every problem that comes up and solved it because we have a commercial interest.” He did acknowledge, however, that the $3,000 dollars that costs to have the tests should perhaps be decreased.

A short video of just the scene with Dr. Skolnick can be found here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joanna-rudnick/aclu-files-case-challengi_b_203593.html

DISCUSSION WITH PANELISTS

Sandra Park, ACLU Women’s Rights Project Attorney, opened the discussion on gene patenting following the showing of the film. She is involved in the lawsuit against Myriad, Association For Molecular Pathology et al v. United States Patent and Trademark Office et al, filed in 2009 in the district court of the Southern District of New York.

This case, initiated by the ACLU, is the first case in the United States about whether genes should be patentable subject matter. Sandra Park described the various claims, including both statutory and Constitutional claims, featured in the lawsuit. She argued that these patents on human genes do not further the progress of science.

Ellen Matloff, genetic counselor and plaintiff in the breast cancer gene patent challenge, described how the cost of the test has increasingly gone up during the last decade despite the underlying genomic technologies becoming cheaper and cheaper. She also described the problems with interpreting genetic tests. For example, some women whose tests results were misinterpreted had their breasts removed despite not having the mutation. Other women ended up dying from breast cancer despite thinking that their tests had come up negative. Ellen Matloff refuted Dr. Skolnick’s claim in the film that tests are available because of Myriad. She claimed that many genetic counselors were administering the tests for BRCA1 and BRCA2 before Myriad began to enforce its patents.

Christopher Mason, from Cornell University, described his involvement in the gene patenting case. He also suggested that the ability of university researchers to study patented genes in the course of academic research is unclear. He suggested that in a few years it will be possible to sequence each person’s genome for a few hundred dollars. If the gene patenting issue is not solved, it is possible that we will get our sequences with large sections (those that include patented genes) redacted.

Ady Barkan, a 3L at Yale Law School, then described the relation of gene patenting to the issues that face a YLS student group, Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM), in which he is involved. He raised the issue of monopoly pricing for pharmaceutical companies. The goal of UAEM is to induce governments to sell drugs cheaply in the third world, while charging monopoly prices in the United States. This contrasts with the goals of the ACLU in the Myriad case, which is to eliminate patents for genes. Sandra Park responded to Ady’s comments, stating that studies show that the financial incentives associated with patents do not further the discover of genes or the availability of genetic testing. For pharmaceuticals, which are so expensive to produce and push through the government’s approval process, patents are more appropriate than for for human genes.

Sandra Park suggested that the 1980 case of Chakrabarty supports the opinion of the ACLU. There have been many cases that concern the purification of natural products. Some of these seem to support that ACLU, some do not. This issue, whether isolated DNA is patentable, will likely be the key to the Myriad case. The process of isolating DNA was well known at the time that Myriad isolated BRCA1 and BRCA2. The only thing new in Myriad’s patent claim is the sequence itself, which should perhaps be considered a natural product or law of nature, and therefore unpatentable.

The public awareness raised by the Myriad case could lead to legislation on gene patenting even if the lawsuit is unsuccessful. The issue of whether a correlation could be patented, that is, whether it is a law of nature, was granted certiorari and then dismissed as improvidently granted in a previous case. But Justices Breyer’s dissent from the dismissal suggests that at least some on the Supreme Court are resistant to the idea that correlations can be patented.

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