More on PAIPO, this time from Senegal

The cigarette substitute PAIPO was intended
as a healthy substitute -- but is the latest version
of the PAIPO draft healthy enough for Africa?

Afro-IP has received this paper from Ibrahima Diop. Ibrahima is one of the Senegalise experts who implemented that country's national IP plan. Ibrahima calls on the African authorities and people not to adopt PAIPO's final draft statute because of it takes a maximalist position on IP protection without paying attention to management of the public domain and knowledge access in order to implement new innovations.

The attached paper is a publicly available draft of an official paper which was prepared for the competent Senegalese authorities before the CAMCOST held in Brazza on 12 to 16 November 2012. The text is in French.

Afro Leo is always happy to further the debate. He notes that there is a strong sentiment in some quarters that somehow the public domain can be "farmed" and a crop of innovations made to grow from it -- but it seems to him that there is little tangible evidence that this is so. Perhaps the best provable uses of the public domain are educational, and also in avoiding the wastage which occurs when resources are committed to the research, development and testing of technologies that are already known but weren't easily found.

What do readers think?

For some earlier Afro-IP posts on PAIPO click here, here and here