The People's Champion found and tweeted this (and you thought that Twitter was useless!). In essence, South Africa is looking at forced patents on intellectual property. The ramifications of this are mind-boggling. I can't believe it will happen, but in any case, IP is a big issue for me, and for LD.
...a proposal in South Africa, that would potentially require patents on certain publicly funded research. While this seems totally backwards for any number of reasons (and many of us believe that publicly funded research should be available to the public since they paid for it), apparently some are concerned that "foreign multinationals" might "misappropriate" the research. So, even if a university and the researcher choose not to protect the research results with IP, if a government body determines that the results could have commercial viability, it would have the ability to control the rights. More...
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