A2K - Access to Knowledge: A Guide for Everyone

[Tracey P. Lauriault]

Access to Knowledge: A Guide for Everyone (http://a2knetwork.org/handbook)

The purpose of this book is to provide an accessible introduction to the A2K movement and the institutions, concepts and issues involved in it, for those who would like to become involved but don't know where to start. In a truly collaborative exercise, information from various freely-licensed sources has been combined with text especially written for this book, and the whole has been made available for you to freely copy, share and modify.

TOC:

1 Background 1

1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1.2 Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

1.3 Actors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

2 Fairer laws and enforcement practices 29

2.1 Copyright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

2.2 Patents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

2.3 IP enforcement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

3 Alternative ways of sharing knowledge 61

3.1 Public domain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

3.2 Open licensing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

3.3 Collective licensing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70

3.4 Libraries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

3.5 Open standards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

3.6 Open data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82

4 Promoting human rights in the information society 87

4.1 Communications rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

4.2 Access to ICTs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98

4.3 Governance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

5 Resources 107

vii

--
Tracey P. Lauriault
613-234-2805