SOUTH AFRICA: Jury out on intellectual property laws

"Will South Africa's Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research and Development (IPR) Act incentivise or bureaucratise innovation at public universities? Some academics are concerned about the law's impacts on international collaboration and open access to research, among other things....[T]he act takes ownership of intellectual property away from the individual inventor and vests it in the public institution in which the research was conducted. The institution is then obliged to protect and commercialise the IP, and to share any benefits of such commercialisation with the IP creator....If the institution chooses not to protect and commercialise IP, it is required to pass it on to the state via a National IP Management Office....The Act applies whenever public funds, however small, are used for research and development and is modelled on the United States Bayh-Dole Act, passed in 1980....Eve Gray of the Centre for Educational Technology at the University of Cape Town, argues that the Act frames the commercialisation of research through patenting and IP protection as the only way to achieve the wider benefit the law seeks from publicly funded research. "The legislation appears to see open innovation, open source and open access as aberrations that need to be controlled through a bureaucratic process of government scrutiny," she wrote in the national newspaper Business Day last year...."