Access To Knowledge in Egypt

This book is the second in a series of volumes and reports that study the relationship between knowledge policy and development in selected countries in the global South. The series arose out of a research initiative on Access to Knowledge begun in 2004 by members of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School (ISP), an interdisciplinary research center that studies the implications of the Internet and new information technologies for law and society. Building on this earlier work, the MacArthur Foundation commissioned the ISP to explore the state of access to knowledge in the global South, working together with scholars from around the world. The first volume, Access to Knowledge in Brazil, was published by the ISP in September 2008, and is now available in a new edition from Bloomsbury Academic. On behalf of the ISP, I would like to thank Yale Law School’s Dean Harold Koh – as well as President Jonathan Fanton, Elspeth Revere and Kathy Im of the MacArthur Foundation – for their support of these studies. The conventional wisdom in Egypt examines the issue of intellectual property solely as a question of policing and enforcement. The high levels of protection indicated by the WTO Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights are unquestioningly assumed to be desirable. Policy debates - and all too often academic ones as well - focus only on the questions of how to more efficiently tighten IP protection and crack down on piracy. Yet a more critical examination is urgently needed, whereby IP law, policy, and practice are viewed from a development perspective, rather than from an enforcement perspective. This volume takes on this endeavor. It offers the first examination of IP issues in Egypt adopting a multidisciplinary bottom-up approach that aims at maximizing access and contribution to knowledge, and in turn, promoting development. Bringing rigorous empirical research to bear on unquestioned ideologies, the collaborating authors question the conventional wisdom that more IP protection is necessarily better for innovation and development.